RUTHFULLY YOURS

Free-marketers are right that tax cuts stimulate economic growth that in turn lead to expanding production and eventually more federal tax revenue.

But the problem traditionally has been that to obtain tax reductions, Republicans also have had to sign on reluctantly to larger expenditures. Or, worse, they willingly believed they could spend more, simply because more money poured into the federal treasuries.
https://amgreatness.com/2018/02/11/republican-embarrassments/

George W. Bush doubled the national debt. After running against Bush profligacy (remember the Chinese credit card trope), Barack Obama doubled it again by doubling Bush’s levels of borrowing. Conservatives blasted Obama for his even greater lack of thrift. The Tea Party movement emerged in reaction to reckless expenditures and borrowing to fund Obamacare.

Now Donald Trump is caught in the same old matrix. His deregulation, tax cuts, and energy expansion will likely increase federal revenue. But his various budget concessions and his own proposed increases in defense spending and infrastructure would likely bleed the budget at a far greater rate than the growing federal revenue.

Once again, new spending will discredit conservative vows of budget prudence and supply-side economics. (Budget-wise, what good does it do to expand the economy if the political price is acquiescence to ever greater and costlier government?)

Every time you think there’s nothing left, no area or topic, where race can’t be injected into the conversation, you’re wrong. An African-American skater on the U.S. Olympic team refused to attend the opening celebration because of the results of a coin toss that decided whether he or a white female skater would represent the United States at the ceremony.

The skater, Shani Davis, said the coin toss was “dishonorable,” even though it was the previously agreed-upon method for breaking a tie vote among U.S. athletes. Davis included the hashtag #BlackHistoryMonth2018 in his tweet along with a list of his accomplishments that he said should have made him the flag-bearer. It seems as if Davis is alleging the first racially motivated coin toss in Olympic history.

Race also factored in another Olympic controversy last week. Fox News vice president John Moody penned an opinion column that took potshots at a Washington Post story in which U.S. Olympic Committee officials touted the diversity gains among this year’s Winter Olympics team even though the team remained “overwhelmingly white.” Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion, told the Post, “We’ve just been trying to find ways to make sure our team looks like America.”

Moody took issue with this approach, saying, “In Olympics, let’s focus on the winner of the race — not the race of the winner.” He noted that there were no plans to fix the disparity among races in the National Basketball Association, where 81 percent of the players are African-American. Others have noted that there are understandable reasons of geography and interest level that may explain racial disparities at the Olympics. In this year’s Winter Olympics, 4 percent of the U.S. team was African-American, while 13 percent of the general population is African-American. In the most recent Summer Olympics, in Rio, 23 percent of the U.S. team was African-American.

Worse things have happened in the last week or two. Worse things have been said. Yet what sticks in my mind and won’t go away are a few sentences that came out of Nancy Pelosi’s mouth during her marathon speech to the House last Wednesday.

She was there, on the House floor, to speak up for the so-called “Dreamers” – people who were brought illegally to America by their parents when they were children and who now want to be accorded legal residency, if not citizenship.

As Pelosi and other advocates for “Dreamers” have tirelessly asserted, some of them have made exemplary contributions to the United States. Others, however, in the course of agitating for residency status, have engaged in activities that hardly serve their cause.

They’ve waved Mexican flags. They’ve posed for pictures giving the finger to Mount Rushmore. They’ve cursed America, they’ve sneered and snarled at it – exhibiting a hostility to the country so intense that it makes one wonder just why they’re so eager to be Americans.

And yet they’ve been taken up as heroes by the left – even as others who’ve gone through the laborious and expensive process of securing U.S. residency legally have been made to feel like fools for doing it the right way.

It was because of the “Dreamers” that the Democrats closed down the government for a couple of days, causing military families to worry that their paychecks might not show up in the mail. And it was because of the “Dreamers” that Pelosi, age 77, broke the record for the longest speech ever given on the House floor – eight hours and ten minutes.

Before the Nunes memo was released, Democrats, the media and its intelligence sources insisted that it would undermine national security, reveal tradecraft secrets and even get agents killed.

Senator Cory Booker warned that it might be treasonously “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.” It was, but not in the way that he meant. The memo didn’t have anything resembling classified information it. Neither did the Grassley-Graham criminal referral which was heavily redacted to screen out all the “classified information.” What did the classified information consist of?

The Grassley-Graham criminal referral went through two FBI redactions. Julie Kelly at American Greatness compared the two versions to see what was hidden.

Most of the redactions in the first version, that were exposed in the second version, involved the problems with the FISA warrant application’s reliance on Christopher Steele. The references to the FISA warrant, which is classified, allowed figures in the FBI to redact it. But none of the references reveal anything damaging to our national security. They do raise serious questions about the FBI’s actions.

The FBI redacted the fact that the FISA warrant was thoroughly based on the Clinton-Steele dossier. Even if the FISA application is classified, Clinton opposition research isn’t. The FBI redacted the accusation that the FISA warrant had failed to state that Steele had been working for the Clinton campaign. That certainly isn’t classified information though it took a lot of work to expose.

The redaction even cut the FBI’s own revelation that Steele went rogue because he was upset at the reopening of the Clinton email investigation. The original documents that mention this may have been classified, but there is no legitimate national security reason for hiding this information from the public.

Revealing it exposes no “tradecraft” secrets that our enemies might exploit. It certainly won’t get anyone killed. Though it could and should get some of those responsible fired.