RUTHFULLY YOURS

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., writes frequently about real estate development, public/private partnerships, constitutional law, social policy, higher education, and the Middle East and is past President fo Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)

Now that Dr. Ben Carson has moved closer to being confirmed as President-Elect Trump’s candidate for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the new administration can begin planning to fulfill promises outlined in a 10-point “plan for urban renewal,” which promised “tax holidays for inner-city investment and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods.” It also pledges to “empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities in order to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.”

This language sounds like a resurrection of Jack Kemp’s “enterprise zone” model, an idea that reappeared in the Clinton years as “empowerment zones” and with George W. Bush as “Go-Zones,” and can now provide a model for President Trump’s campaign promise to jump-start the rebuilding of inner cities and enlist the private sector in helping to complete this task.

The key to the empowerment zone concept is that it attempts to solve the problems of inner-city unemployment and poverty without direct, substantial government expenditure. It also uses a number of incentives – investment and employment tax credits, regulatory relief, capital gains exclusions, employee training, business incubators, low-interest loans, and other tools – to draw investment into areas that, absent the incentives, would be unlikely to have materialized.

Dr. Carson himself articulated an interesting twist on finding tax revenue to fund the administration’s ambitious plans. He has said that Trump will “be working on empowering people in empowerment zones throughout cities, using a lot of the money from overseas that is stuck over there because of our tax situation,” meaning they hope to convince U.S. companies, many of whose profits are currently offshore, to bring the corporate taxes due on those monies back to America, necessarily with the incentive of a reduced tax rate.

The beauty of deriving a new stream of revenue from repatriated corporate profits, of course, is that it does not cannibalize existing tax revenues and instead provides a new source of taxes which, absent the incentives, would otherwise not be realized. Given that an estimated $2.4 trillion of profits from Fortune 500 companies has been “permanently reinvested” offshore to avoid onerous U.S. federal income taxes, even a reduced, irresistible corporate tax rate of, say, 10% (less than one third current rates) could theoretically yield $200 billion, some or all of which could be earmarked for investing in the rehabilitation and improvement of distressed urban centers. In fact, corporations could be further incentivized by slashing the tax rates even more if companies agree to either relocate some of the business units into the new zones or, if they cannot relocate, pay into a managed fund that would be used specifically in the zones.

If you had 11 days and the “over,” you lost. We’re referring to the bet on how long it would take Barack Obama to criticize his presidential successor. For the record our wager was 30 days, but then we always expected more from the former President than he delivered.

Mr. Obama couldn’t even wait until he finished his post-inaugural vacation before he had a spokesman issue a statement Monday afternoon reporting that the former President “is heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country” against President Trump’s refugee order.

“Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake,” added spokesman Kevin Lewis. “With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.”

No one doubts that, but then Syrian refugees became a global crisis in large part because Mr. Obama did almost nothing for five years as President to stop the civil war, much less help refugees. Here are the number of Syrians his Administration admitted: fiscal year 2011, 29; 2012, 31; 2013: 36; 2014, 105; 2015, 1,682. Only in 2016 did he increase the target to 13,000, though actual admissions haven’t been disclosed. Mr. Obama also barely lifted a hand to help resettle translators who worked with GIs in Iraq or Afghanistan.

We oppose Mr. Trump’s refugee order, but it takes a special kind of gall for Mr. Obama and his advisers like Susan Rice to lecture anyone about “American values” and refugees from chaos in the Middle East.

The Trump Administration is already a jumble of economic contradictions, but the “great” side of the ledger got an important new entry on Monday. President Trump signed an executive order adopting a “two-for-one” regulatory budget that will help accelerate growth and innovation.

The Obama years were a boom era for rule-making, but the truth is that obsolete and onerous rules have been accumulating for decades. In a working paper for George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Bentley Coffey,Patrick McLaughlin and Pietro Peretto estimate that the economy would be about 25% larger if the level of U.S. regulation had stayed constant since 1980. That’s now more than $4 trillion a year, or $13,000 per person.

The Trump order aims to prevent such waste by requiring the agencies to repeal two old rules for every new one they publish. This is in some sense a gimmick, since some regulations are far more significant, costly or distorting of investment choices than others. But the text of the order suggests that for every dollar of new cost imposed on the private economy, each agency will have to find two dollars of burden to relieve.

Democrats are freaking out about poisonous milk and killer toys, though many civilized countries use such budgets to manage the regulatory state and stay competitive. Canada requires every rule that creates another hour of paperwork for business compliance to be offset one for one. The United Kingdom and Australia have harder versions that require the costs of new rules to be offset by deregulation of comparable net value.

The permanent bureaucracy lives to justify its own existence, regardless of which party holds the White House, and rules inevitably beget more rules. Mr. Trump’s order starts to change the institutional incentives.

Under a two-for-one policy, each individual department will need to scrutinize its own books in search of offsets and rules needing modernization, which will make deregulation as high a priority as rule-making. The Environmental Protection Agency can’t poach savings uncovered at, say, the Fish and Wildlife Service. This could lead to more realistic cost-benefit tests, focus the bureaucracy on trade-offs and strengthen regulatory accountability.

A day or two before the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump on January 20th, 2017, I watched a reporter interviewing five attractive, intelligent, articulate women from California, who were all making the long cross-country trip to the Women’s March on Washington on January 21st.

Amazingly, not one woman was able to express a persuasive or even rational reason for the trip, but instead resorted to time-worn platitudes, bromides, and leftist talking points about “unity” and “solidarity” and “getting the message out.” Um… what message?

At the March itself, I was struck by the fact that women who pride themselves on their intelligence resorted to reading their statements, never veering a syllable off the scripts that were clearly written for them—scripts, by the way, that were not only boilerplate and banal, but shockingly blasphemous.

Madonna, punctuating her statement with foul-mouthed obscenities, looked down at her script, then lifted her head to speak into the microphone. “I’m angry.” Pause. Again, she looked at her script, then read: “I’m outraged.” (Very difficult lines to memorize, to be sure). Pause. Again, back to the script where she read about her fantasy of “blowing up the White House.”

Gloria Steinem read from her script. America Ferrara read from her script. Ashley Judd both read and acted out her script. “We’re here to be respected,” she snarled, oblivious to the irony that her ghastly performance evoked the exact opposite.

On and on and on they intoned and screeched and railed, sounding remarkably like barnyard creatures and giving the rest of America the distinct impression that the conceit these women harbor of their superior intellects and evolved moral sensibilities are fantasies borne more of delusions of grandeur than of either objective IQ numbers or developed moral compasses.

But to be fair, they had genuine passion that inspired them to spend thousands of dollars to drive, bus or fly across the country, pay for lodging and food, and then travel back to their homes.

Just kidding. We all know that leftwing activists are notoriously cheap, believers as they are that either government or other benefactors should pay their way.

And sure enough, according to Matthew Vadum’s stunning article, “Soros’s Women’s March of Hate,” billionaire radical George Soros—the same man “who says Communist China’s system of government is superior to our own and that the United States is the number one obstacle to world peace”—was directly involved in funding at least 56 of the March’s ‘partners.’”

Vadum listed a good number of the radical-left and anti-American groups attending the March: Planned Parenthood, the National Resource Defense Council, MoveOn, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, Advancement Project; American Constitution Society; America’s Voice; Arab American Association of New York; Asian Americans Advancing Justice; Center for Reproductive Rights; Color of Change; Communities United for Police Reform; Demos; Economic Policy Institute; Every Voice; Green for All; League of Women Voters; Make the Road New York; MPower Change; NAACP; NARAL Pro-Choice America Fund; National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum; National Council of Jewish Women; National Domestic Workers Alliance; National Network for Arab American Communities; National Council of La Raza; PEN America; Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Public Citizen; United We Dream; and Voter Participation Center,” et al.

No previous President of the United States has been so hated by America’s political, journalistic, and cultural elites as has Donald Trump. None has been the target of as much verbal abuse, vilification and demonization, and false and biased reporting emanating from these elites as has Trump-with the only possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

No previous candidate for President of a major political party has been subjected to such systematic and widespread harassment on the campaign trail as has Trump. None before him has met with such widespread and well-organized attempts, often violent, to disrupt his campaign rallies, to prevent him from speaking, to prevent citizens from attending his rallies, harassing and even assault them if they did insist on attending them.

No President-elect has been targeted by so many hostile and often violent protest after he was elected in an election whose outcome was not even seriously in dispute.

Never before have the members of the Electoral College, chosen by the people in accordance with a provision in our constitution going back 230 years, been subjected to such massive pressure, even threats, to vote contrary to the wishes of the citizens who elected them, and thereby “deselecting” a President-elect.

No previous President has been subjected to so many hostile, large, extremely well organized and often violent protest demonstrations nationwide, including several in the nation’s capital, on the very day of his inauguration and for nearly every day since then, in an attempt to create sufficient disruption and chaos that he would be unable to govern.

To sum up: never before in American history have so many people belonging to our nation’s power structures and established institutions resorted to such unethical, undemocratic, underhanded, disruptive, and often violent methods-systematically and on a nationwide scale-in an effort first to deny a presidential candidate his election, to prevent him from taking office after he was elected, and to delegitimize him and render him unable to govern after he took the oath of office.

His critics, especially in the media, just can’t understand why their lies, false dossiers and pejorative dismissals of the man haven’t ruined him. The tactic helped humble George W. Bush and, locally, Tony Abbott, but this president punches back twice as hard. There’s a lesson there.
When President Trump addressed CIA agents as one of his first acts he received generous ovations. I know. I listened to them. At one point he talked about his inaugural crowd size and (accompanied by engaged laughter) the dishonest press. His critics pounced. Wailing at his temerity at being off-point and self-indulgent in front of the Memorial Wall where stars honour the CIA fallen. They had a point, but deliberately overlooked the very positive result he achieved by reassuring the intelligence community of his support. His critics are in a permanent crouching mode.

His first week was active to say the least. He signed five Executive Orders and nine Memorandums, all in keeping with his campaign promises. And he found the time in his eighteen-hour working days to give at least three sit-down interviews, to meet with major manufacturers, with union leaders and with British PM Theresa May. But, into this overwhelmingly productive week, he also injected talk not only about the crowd size at his inauguration but also about the likelihood that millions of people voted illegally robbing him of the popular vote. His critics pounced again.

And many of his supporters, how do they respond? They say he would do better to avoid queering his own pitch. They want Trump without Trump; Father Christmas without soot on the carpet. They should understand that the soot is an integral part of the territory.

Apparently, Donald Trump doesn’t like the idea of coming second in anything. He likes to tell us, in various ways, that he was right or did an excellent job. To his critics, who include most of the media, the Democrats and many Republicans, he is a narcissistic braggart. Again, they have a point. But he is a lot of other things too. And his narcissism, in my view, is an armoured shield; the key to his unique ability to withstand the dark forces which have taken over American society — its media, schools, universities and public services — as they have all Western societies.

Have you noticed when someone in the public eye is labelled pejoratively that we are meant somehow to infer that the case is closed? That there is nothing more to be said; that he or she can be filed away under whatever is the pejorative label. It is ridiculous in the general case and in Trump’s case particularly ridiculous. Here we have a unique and talented human being

I have heard him described as a loving and supportive father and as a warm, caring and humorous friend. He is obviously a very good businessman, who can come back from the brink, and reality-TV-show entertainer extraordinaire. And, so far, judging by the quality of his appointments and his resolute action, he is showing distinct promise of being a formidable political leader. It is early days of course.

But, leave all this aside, he is impervious to criticism. The nervous Nellies in his own party must be quaking in their boots. He simply does what he says he will do and says what’s on his mind. This is beyond normal behaviour among the political class. Maybe Margaret Thatcher came closest but the dark forces are stronger now than then. Conservatives in power are used to bowing and scraping before the altar of political correctness and doing their best to hide themselves from the rapacious left-driven media. Trump simply takes the fight on in a way which before him was unimaginable.

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