RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-governments-woke-training-federal-employees-diversity-equity-inclusion-11672251764?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Department of Veterans Affairs has a gender gingerbread person. NASA says beware of micro-inequities. And if U.S. Army servicewomen express “discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia,” what’s the brass’s reply? Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.

These are details from hundreds of pages of diversity and inclusion training materials used by the federal government in 2021 and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Everyone in corporate life knows such training, lampooned in the second episode of the TV show “The Office.” Yet taxpayers might be curious how their money is being spent to instruct the federal workforce these days.

Documents obtained via FOIA often lack context, so it’s hard to know the audience for any specific training and whether participation was voluntary or not-so-politely encouraged. With those caveats, press ahead.

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Asked for its diversity training, the U.S. Army offered three modules on transgender policy, one for “Commanders at all levels,” another for “Special Staff,” and a third for “Units and Soldiers.” Notable is a series of vignettes that cover pronoun usage, urinalysis observation, and a serviceman who wants “to discuss his newly confirmed pregnancy.” With respect to showers, schedules can be adjusted or curtains installed. But a soldier’s gender in the Army’s system governs which facilities are used. Accommodating only a transgender soldier is prohibited.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-business-tax-increases-tax-foundation-biden-administration-11672347767?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Happy New Year, or, if you’re in business, unhappy new tax year. American employers are getting hit in 2023 with a variety of tax increases even as the risk of recession rises along with interest rates.

The tax hikes arrive for two reasons: provisions of the 2017 GOP tax reform that are phasing out, and big tax increases that passed as part of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act. The Biden Administration doesn’t want to tell you this, so we thought we’d list the unmentionables:

• Capital expensing. The biggest business tax hit is the end of full, immediate expensing for equipment. The 2017 tax reform spurred investment by letting businesses immediately deduct the full cost of hardware like trucks and machines, but that policy is set to phase out. The maximum early deduction drops this year to 80%, and it will continue to decrease each year until it disappears in 2026.

“Delayed deductions effectively shift taxes forward in time,” says a Tax Foundation report, resulting in “less capital formation, lower productivity and wages, and less output.” The change won’t help business investment, which fell 22% from April to October.

• R&D expensing. This big hit has already arrived. January 2022 marked the end of full expensing for corporate research and development, a benefit that began in 1954. Companies could previously deduct R&D spending from their next tax bill, but they now have to spread the deduction over several years (five years for domestic spending, 15 for international).

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/03/the-war-on-trucks-trucking-and-truckers-and-other-modern-conveniences/

In the same way our “superiors” think that their food comes from the grocery store rather than a farm or ranch, they must believe that those items magically appear on the shelves. Otherwise, why would the ruling class, made up of and zealously backed by elites, go to war against trucks?

Just before Christmas, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that it calls a “key step toward accelerating zero-emissions future,” and part of “​​the historic Clean Truck Plan, which is moving America’s highly polluting heavy-duty trucking fleet towards low-carbon and electric technologies.”

Enforcement of course will mean fewer trucks on the road. For many drivers, the cost of working under the new regime will be too high.

“Truckers and manufacturers warn that the rule is too stringent and costly, and that compliance could send higher prices through the economy that is already suffering from high energy costs and high inflation,” says the Institute for Energy Research.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association warns that “if small business truckers can’t afford the new, compliant trucks,” they will keep their older, less-efficient trucks, or simply “leave the industry entirely.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/01/its-time-to-give-the-diversitycrats-their-marching-orders/

Have we reached peak woke – or will the cult of intersectionality grow even bigger in 2023?

If you think of the woke movement as fundamentally religious in nature, one way of answering that question is to see what the duration was of comparable outbreaks of religious fervour in our recent history. According to Wikipedia, there have been four ‘Great Awakenings’ in the past 300 years, the first lasting about 25 years, the second and third 50 or more, and the fourth in the 1960s and 1970s lasting about 20.

Most people trace the origins of the current ‘Great Awokening’ to roughly around 2013, meaning we’ll be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. One reason for thinking it might be peaking is that its growth has been accelerated by social media and – presumably – its decline will be, too. Twitter, in particular, has been one of the chief platforms for promoting woke ideology, as well as for punishing those who dissent from it, and that is bound to change now that Rocket Man Elon Musk is in charge.

The woke cult’s appeal is partly rooted in the idea that it is of a piece with the Zeitgeist, that the woke are ‘on the right side of history’, and that those resisting it will inevitably end up looking foolish and out of date.

Fortunately, there were signs in 2022 that being woke is no longer as ‘on trend’ as it was, and that could be a serious blow to its authority. Take, for instance, the fact that the unashamedly patriotic Top Gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing film of the year, beating out an endless stream of woke offerings. Once the victory of the social-justice warriors ceases to look historically inevitable, many of the less committed will fall by the wayside.