That idiot Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire thinks Woodrow Wilson changed America for the better

He's also the idiot who wrote the TARP bailout.

And now he's the idiot who blames the Baby Boom for the programs bankrupting America: Social Security and Medicare, which pre-date it and were passed by spendthrift Democrats.

Here.

NYT claims 2010 Obama Paygo law would require mandatory spending cuts under the Republican tax bill

From the story here:

The biggest program affected would be Medicare, the health insurance program for older people and the disabled. But the law allows Medicare to take only a relatively small cut: 4 percent. Other programs have no such protection. ... [Paygo] requires that legislation that adds to the federal deficit be paid for with spending cuts, increases in revenue or other offsets.

How to tax the rich and only the rich as originally intended in 1913, and solve a lot of problems

In 1913 when the average Joe made about $800 a year, the first income tax under the 16th Amendment didn't worry him because he didn't pay it and probably thought he never would. The personal exemption for a married couple in the original tax code was $4,000.

Today that $4,000 personal exemption adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index amounts to about $100,000.

Even in 2016 that kind of income is made by fewer than 10% of individual wage earners. Under the original income tax of 1913, 90% today wouldn't have to worry about paying the dreaded income tax either.

Is there a way to return to this golden age of taxation?

I'm here to tell you that I think so, and I say that as a conservative. We could easily simplify the tax code by returning to the status quo which prevailed before the First World War, pay all the bills, abolish Social Security and Medicare taxes, the corporate income tax and all the other little irritating taxes and reduce income inequality in the process. We'd also save a lot of time and money wasted in complying with the tax code's myriad baroque features.

Here's the math.

In 2016 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income in the United States was $15.9287 trillion.

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary tells us that in 2016 there were 163.5 million individual wage earners. If you exempt the first $100,000 of everybody's individual wage income in 2016, including from the rich, you're talking about $6.213 trillion of individual wage income which would be tax-free.

That leaves $9.7157 trillion of personal income left in 2016 to tax, to pay all the bills.

According to The Tax Policy Center, the bills were the total estimated federal outlays of $3.9513 trillion in 2016.

So, the tax is 40.67% (9.7157 X .4067 = 3.9513) on all personal income in excess of $100,000 a year, no itemized deductions, no credits of any kind (this is where they all came from in the first place, because the rich pissed, moaned and complained and bribed the politicians to carve out privileges for them to escape paying).

The rich, all 14.9 million of them, will still have $7.2544 trillion to play with ($1.49 trillion from their first $100K tax-free, just like everybody else, and $5.7644 trillion left over after taxes from the income in excess of $100K).

The rest of us, 148.6 million, won't pay any federal income tax, Social Security or Medicare tax, gasoline tax, or any other kind of federal tax on our $4.723 trillion. The only taxes we'll have to pay will be State and Local Income Taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and the like. Of course rich people will have to pay those too, but that's a problem for all of us and for a different level of politics.

I summarize:

$15.9287 trillion personal income 2016 (BEA)

-  3.9513 trillion federal taxes, all from those making $100,000+ per year @40.67%

-  7.2544 trillion left over for the 14.9 million making $100,000+ per year (top 10%)

-  4.7230 trillion left over for the 148.6 million making less than $100,000 per year (bottom 90%)

___________________________________________________________________

0

And the budget balances.   

The Reagan GDP miracle is a complete myth: It was all government spending (on defense)

And it set a horrible precedent for the dramatic overspending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which has sent us on a course to oblivion. You can argue it was necessary to defeat the USSR, but you can't argue that baseline spending (in black) has done anything but go up, up, up to dangerous new levels as a result (notice the baseline Jimmy Carter inherited from liberal Republicanism, for which he got the blame from Ronald Reagan, which wasn't very nice of the old man who went on to bequeath a similar giant new baseline to his successor, G.H.W. Bush).

No, the real miracle was the pathetic loser in Iran, Jimmy Carter, who spent the least in the post-war for his additional GDP, followed by Bill Clinton.

Of course, the spending is all the prerogative of the Congress. The president proposes but the Congress disposes, as the saying goes.

Beware libertarian politicians preaching balanced budgets, as well as utopian infrastructure spending enthusiasts promising the moon and liberal Republicans selling government spending as security to senior citizens at the expense of younger Americans in a time of protracted war. They have delivered little beyond $20 trillion in debt.

Ted Cruz concluded Mitch McConnell is a liar in 2015, now Ron Johnson appears to be doing the same

The Ted Cruz incident with McConnell involved the Export-Import Bank (story here).

Now, Ron Johnson is reportedly concluding McConnell committed a breach of trust by privately telling moderate senators that the Medicaid cuts in the healthcare bill won't actually occur, as reported here.

The current Republican bill in the Senate appears dead as four senators in the Republican caucus have said they don't support it. With a 2-seat majority, only 3 defections are tolerable (the tie-breaker vote is cast by the Vice President, Mike Pence).

When all is said and done we might find out that the loss of support is all intentional and orchestrated in order to save the Senate from having to vote on the issue again at all. The nay-sayers may be handsomely rewarded at some future date while getting to please their constituencies.

Remember, Republicans generally don't believe in anything except for what is. In other words, maintaining the status quo is their objective. They are pragmatists who are willing to accept progressive creations once passed, like the income tax, Social Security, Medicare and now Obamacare, and will defend those programs no matter how they became law.

Lighting their hair on fire for anything is completely out of the question, including for the constitution.

The only thing that will save us now is a meteor strike on the Senate chamber while they are all in session.

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal of Obamacare's individual and corporate mandates instead of the stinker bill now being proposed by the Republicans in the Senate.

That way those of us who can obtain real insurance like we did before will obtain it again but at a cheaper cost than now, and those who can't will still have Medicaid, but funded by dead certain payrolls instead of the hodge podge of state and federal funding now.

Because of Obamacare, those who have insurance are subsidizing at enormous expense to themselves those who have become covered since 2009 under the plan, mostly under Medicaid. Medicaid alone has swelled by 25 million people thanks to Obamacare. It's a massive income redistribution scheme from those who have insurance to those who don't, which is manifestly unfair. There are easily 48 million people in this country making less than $15,000 a year who have no skin in this game yet qualify for Medicaid.

The answer, short of returning to the status quo ante where millions are kicked off of Medicaid, is to make more people pay their fair share. This means taxing every dollar of compensation with a Medicaid tax, just like we do with Medicare. The burden should be born by everyone, including those now receiving Medicaid.

Currently we have about 55.5 million enrolled in Medicare, supported by a 1.45% payroll tax. It isn't enough support, but there it is.

Medicaid on the other hand has exploded under Obamacare to coverage of 75 million, but state budgets, like individuals' budgets under Obamacare's outrageously expensive health insurance, are breaking badly under the burden. 33 will fall short of revenue targets in the current fiscal year.

The proportional Medicaid payroll tax rate implied by 75 million program participants is at least 1.95%.

This is Trump's opportunity to put Medicaid on a sounder footing.

Republicans won't like this plan because it involves a new tax, even though many people are already paying this tax to one degree or another depending on their tax obligation in their state of residence. The revenues, insufficient as they are, are already collected at the state level, but variably.

So it's not really a new tax. It's a new collector.

Democrats ought to love this idea, for the obvious reason. It codifies the nation's "obligation" to the poor's healthcare in the form of a tax, just as Medicare codifies the nation's obligation to the elderly's healthcare. With it they can claim Obamacare is still the law of the land in some form.

Pelosi and the House Democrats are well positioned to deliver this in the form of a bill to send to the more evenly divided Senate because Paul Ryan and a coalition of 75 or so liberal Republicans could get it over the goal line, just like they did so many times before in league with the Democrats, making an end run around the House conservatives.

The Senate would go for the bill because it is simply more liberal all around. Democrats there would vote for this, along with liberal Republicans.

Trump needs to get this done and off the table.

We've been arguing about it now in earnest for 8 years already and are just plain sick of it.

Enough already!

Repeal Obamacare root and branch, and institute a Medicaid tax.

Krauthammer thinks Trump might go for single payer in the end, in which case Americans should get it, good and hard

Think of it as socialism with Republican characteristics.

Krauthammer, here:

Obamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage.

Acceptance of its major premise — that no one be denied health care — is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that “our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care,” making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any Obamacare repeal. ...

As Obamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all.

Simplicity? Draco's laws were simple. The penalty for every crime was death.

I wonder if Krauthammer has a clue what he's talking about.

Total Medicare outlays in 2015 came to $632 billion.

Total Medicaid outlays in 2015 came to $552 billion country wide (read the Notes).

Total Social Security and Disability outlays in 2015 came to $897.1 billion.

That is a total of $2.0811 trillion from 2015 total net compensation of $7.4158 trillion, or 28%, without even talking about "universal coverage" yet.

Yet all your typical American pays now for this is 10.63%:

6.2% in Social Security tax and 1.45% for Medicare, plus whatever taxes are paid at the state and local level toward Medicaid, which federal law mandates must account for at least 40% of program revenues. So $221 billion from 160.8 million wage earners across the country in 2015 represents another 2.98% paid by them at the state level.

The status quo therefore is funded only 38% by its beneficiaries, at best. I say "at best" because many beneficiaries pay NOTHING because they don't work and never have. But I digress.

So bring about Krauthammer's revolution, for that is what he's talking about, and reset the table as follows.

Total healthcare outlays in the United States in 2015 came to $3.2 trillion. Add in $897.1 billion for Social Security and Disability, and you now have a "universal" obligation bloated to $4.097 trillion, which represents 55% of net compensation that year.

That's your tax.

You've become France, Germany, Denmark or some other Western European paradise which depends on the United States for its defense.

And that's before even talking about funding the $1.2 trillion part of the federal budget which is discretionary, like defending ourselves against that little fat kid playing with hydrogen bombs in North Korea.

Of course there's another chunk of money out there being made in the United States apart from net compensation, about $8 trillion in 2015. The recipients of this income typically pay the lower capital gains tax rates, not the payroll and income tax rates which are for the chumps.

It's a nice little system which isn't paying its fair share for socialism in the United States, even though it is rich guys who typically shout the loudest on behalf of it. They do this because they know it will keep the little guy down, from whom they don't want the competition some day. But tax that system equally to net compensation and you cut that 55% tax in half, to say 27.5%. That, however, means a big fat tax increase on the rich, and on everybody else. I doubt they'll stand for that any more than they open their checkbooks now to make patriotic voluntary donations to the US Treasury.

We live in a fantasy land where no one wants to pay what it costs for anything.

We think we can have our cake and eat it too.

We want infrastructure spending, and a tax cut dammit.

House Freedom Caucus' Meadows was one of just 7 Republicans to vote against the 2015 Obamacare repeal

Meadow's leadership against the current repeal bill, which is in fact a crummier bill, obscures his isolation previously. 

The roll call vote is here. Buck, Dold, Hanna, Jones, Meadows, Salmon, and Walker voted No. The majority of the Freedom Caucus voted for the bill, including leaders like Justin Amash and Jim Jordan.

Unlike Meadows, Americans for Tax Reform here also supported the bill at the time, as did the broader Republican Caucus in the House (it passed 240-189). ATR acknowledged the difficulty of repealing Obamacare's policy provisions without 60 votes in the Senate, which remains the problem now in 2017.

Jim Jordan is right. Repass H.R. 3762 and send it to Trump.

From ATR:

H.R. 3762 repeals most of the heart of Obamacare. The individual and employer mandates and their attendant tax penalties are gone. The medical device tax is repealed. The “Cadillac plan” excise tax is prevented from coming into effect (more on that later).

On the spending side, H.R. 3762 repeals some unaccountable Obamacare slush funds, shutters IPAB (the Medicare rationing board that Sarah Palin called a “death panel”), and ends Obamacare auto-enrollment. Importantly, it also defunds Planned Parenthood for the fiscal year.

At a markup for the bill, liberal Congressmen went apoplectic at the effect H.R. 3762 would have on Obamacare. Top House Ways and Means Democrat Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) said that the bill ”effectively guts [Obamacare].” Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) said, “this bill really is pulling the legs from under [Obamacare]. It is a deliberate, systematic attempt, not just to repeal, but to destroy [Obamacare].” ...

When the Republicans took the Senate in the 2014 elections, there was a lot of talk about moving bills from Capitol Hill to the President’s desk to force showdowns with the White House. That hasn’t happened, largely because Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has bottled up the Senate in 60 vote purgatory.

The one area he cannot do that is on a privileged budget reconciliation bill like H.R. 3762.

We told you in October 2012 that the income tax makes big government POSSIBLE

Here:

As an invention of progressivism the income tax eventually worked a revolution in government by allowing government to grow to gargantuan size with a ready pool of available cash, stolen by force from the population's income. And it is no coincidence that the first major expenditure financed by the income tax was US entry into The Great War. Not long after which came The Great Depression. If progressive ideas were good ones, no one seems to have paid much heed to the early evidence to the contrary.

Every effort by the people since the introduction of the income tax to obtain deductions, exemptions, credits and other incentives in the tax code should be understood by conservatives as wholesome reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rear-guard opposition to what the income tax represents, but today you can hardly find a conservative who will even entertain the idea of overthrowing the income tax, let alone any other of the so-called "achievements" of the progressive era. In fact, some so-called conservatives have become veritable cheerleaders for the income tax. Rush Limbaugh, for one, can't seem even to imagine an America without one for the first 137 years of its existence. An originalist in name only is he.

The problem with so-called Reagan conservatism, then and now, is that it makes peace with the tax code, just as it does with the social welfare state, including Social Security and especially Medicare. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan actually campaign on just such a platform of preserving Medicare for future generations. As Reagan compromised in the direction of liberalism in the 1986 tax reform, so will they.

Come on, people, Speaker Paul Ryan thought Medicare was a conservative CAUSE in 2012

You expected him to think differently about Obamacare?

WaPo and White House, but I repeat myself, lie about Obamacare enrollments by 100%

WaPo implies more than 20 million are enrolled in a story out today here:

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that Obama told Democrats that they are well positioned to defend the law, which has extended insurance to more than 20 million Americans.

Extended. As in offered. Here's the reality.

The Motley Fool said in November it checked in June and the number actually enrolled and paying was 10.4 million:

The fourth open enrollment period of Obamacare, Officially known as the Affordable Care Act, kicked off this past Tuesday, Nov. 1, and it's slated to run through the end of January. At last check in June 2016, 10.4 million people were enrolled through the various marketplace exchanges, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The Congressional Budget Office has stuck by its forecast that roughly 10 million people will be enrolled and paying by Dec. 31, 2016.

A month earlier the number was 11.1 million, meaning some people who enrolled early in the year subsequently stopped paying and fell out:

As a reminder, 11.1 million people remained enrolled and paying customers as of March 31, 2016 per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services . . .. 

Since last October it has been widely reported that the Obama Regime, soon to be history, has been predicting just 13.8 million sign-ups by the end of January 2017, which means Josh Earnest is nothing but a Stalinist stooge for the Regime, nothing but a salesman, and WaPo its willing accomplice in continuing to report the highly fanciful figure of 20 million.

Fake news, you see.

Obamacare has failed utterly and will be lucky to hit the 10 million mark this time around before President Trump ends the farce that it is.

Drudge is an idiot for calling Wisconsin a battleground based on a WaPo story which is trying to divert Trump's energies

Wisconsin is a distraction. Trump isn't going to win it, and Drudge is a fool for taking the bait and headlining this WaPo story:

‘He’s not one of us’: Trump is still having trouble winning over many Republicans .

Trump is losing Wisconsin to Clinton at this hour by 5.7 points because of #NeverTrump libertarians who follow radio talker Charlie Sykes. That guy's never been on Trump's side and never will be. Wisconsin "conservatives" follow a ridiculous Speaker Paul Ryan who thinks preserving Medicare for future generations is a conservative thing. That's Ripon Society Republicanism, Teddy Roosevelt progressivism.

Libertarian Gary Johnson is polling 6.3 there, way above his current national average of 4.6, accounting for all of Clinton's margin of victory.

Trump shouldn't waste any more time or resources on Wisconsin.

He'd have been far better off trying for Virginia where he is polling better than in Wisconsin, but it's too late for that, too.

Trump's path to the presidency (164 Electoral College votes currently) is through NV, AZ, CO, IA, OH, NC, GA and FL (110).

He might want to visit NH and ME-2 also if he has the resources, but the main battle is in the eight states shown. 

The 2015 cost of Medicaid expansion for 10 million people: $63.66 billion

As reported here:

In a recent report to Congress, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the cost of expansion was $6,366 per person for 2015, about 49 percent higher than previously estimated. ... An estimated 9 million to 10 million people are covered by the Medicaid expansion, and many of the remaining uninsured are likely to be eligible if their states accept. Most of the new Medicaid recipients are low-income adults.

Rush Limbaugh doesn't get it that Trump turned the idea of a healthcare mandate on its head in last night's townhall remarks

When Trump said last night (transcript here) "Well I like the mandate" he didn't mean the individual mandate in Obamacare. Trump may not even have been aware that that's what Anderson Cooper was talking about.

Instead, Trump has his own idea in his head which means that there ought to be a mandate which applies to the government, not to the individual, which states that it is government's responsibility to provide healthcare to people who can't afford it and would die without it:

"I don't want people dying on the streets and I say this all the time."

"The Republican people, they're wonderful people. They don't want people dying on the streets."

"[T]here's going to a group of people at the bottom - people that haven't done well. People that don't have any money that won't be able to be care of [sic]. We're going to take care of them through maybe concepts of Medicare."

"You cannot let people die on the street, OK?" 

"That's called heart. We gotta take care of people that can't take care of themselves."

That's all that's going on there, folks, despite what Ted Cruz partisan Rush Limbaugh is telling you in the show opener today. The mandate's in the "we're going to" and the "cannot" and the "gotta" in those statements.

Capisce?    

Commentary Magazine's Jonathan Tobin doesn't even read what he cites, making a hash of Obamacare story

Jonathan Tobin here:

"This is something of a misnomer because, as the Heritage Institute pointed out in a paper published last month, almost all of these people were simply added to the rolls of those receiving Medicare. If you only count those who are actually receiving insurance outside of Medicare, the net increase of those with coverage (the number of those buying these policies is offset by an almost equal reduction in the number of customers who have employer-based plans) is only 260,000 people."

Ah, no.

First of all the paper was from the "Heritage Foundation", not the "Heritage Institute". Perhaps he's heard of it? It's only been a Washington fixture since like the Reagan Administration. He does remember Reagan, right? Well, he is a neoconservative.

And it was the rolls of Medicaid which were expanded, not Medicare. What kind of a dummy gets that wrong? Medicare is for older Americans. Medicare is supposed to be paid for through payroll taxes, and it's blowing up as we speak, but that's another story. Medicaid used to be health coverage for the poor and the indigent, provided by the States. Leave it to Obama to expand it from DC and call it insurance.

The middle class of this country will end up poor and indigent and on Medicaid, too, if someone doesn't put a stop to this train wreck called Obamacare and soon.

Middle class people have just had their taxes raised dramatically to provide coverage and subsidies to pay for that coverage to about 9 million people who didn't have it before or didn't have what they're getting now. Middle class taxes went up in the form of health insurance premium increases, raised deductibles and skyrocketing pharmaceutical price increases. Middle class people buying the cheapest of plans now can expect to shell out over $13,000 in premiums and deductibles before their plans pay out one red cent of a big healthcare bill. The incentive for them is to avoid care even when they need it in order to save money.  

All Tobin had to do to get the article moving in the right direction was to actually read the title of the Heritage paper and the accompanying abstract, but apparently he didn't do even that. One wonders if he even wrote the story himself. He is Commentary's "editor" after all.

What a putz. 

Backgrounder #3062 on Health Care

October 15, 2015

2014 Health Insurance Enrollment: Increase Due Almost Entirely to Medicaid Expansion

By Edmund F. Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski

Abstract

Health insurance enrollment data for 2014 shows that the number of Americans with health insurance increased by 9.25 million during the year. However, the vast majority of the increase was the result of 8.99 million individuals being added to the Medicaid rolls. While enrollment in private individual-market plans increased by almost 4.79 million, most of that gain was offset by a reduction of 4.53 million in the number of people with employment-based group coverage. Thus, the net increase in private health insurance in 2014 was just 260,000 people.

The New York Times criticizes Republican tax plans, pretending revenues are needed to cover spending

Here:

"All of these candidates deny fiscal reality. In the next 10 years, revenues will need to increase by 40 percent simply to keep federal spending even, per capita, with inflation and population growth. Additional revenues will be needed to pay for health care for the elderly, transportation systems and other obligations, as well as for newer challenges, including climate change. And interest on the national debt will surely rise because interest rates have nowhere to go but up."

Who is the Times trying to kid?

Revenues have never been needed to cover expenditures and they know it, and rarely have covered expenditures. Expenditures will continue to grow whether the Times or the Republicans like it or not. They are baked into the cake of the legislation that drives them. The only way to fix that is to rescind the legislation or modify it, with its built-in cost of living increases and added population coverage assumptions.

This country has run minor annual surpluses in just twelve years since 1939, doing nothing but slowing down our present arrival at $18.2 trillion in debt.

Spare us the histrionics.

The heavy hitters when it comes to spending are:

• HHS ($1 trillion, 91% of which is Medicare and Medicaid)
• Social Security ($.96 trillion)
• Defense ($.59 trillion, protecting the world without reimbursement)
• Treasury Dept. ($.57 trillion, $.4 trillion of which is interest on the debt overspending)
• Veterans ($.16 trillion, which does such a good job veterans die waiting for appointments)
• Agriculture ($.14 trillion, over half of which is the food stamp program).

Together those six account for 88% of federal spending, and the Times dares the Republicans even to think about reforming Social Security and Medicare, calling instead for higher taxes.

Meanwhile there's plenty else to cut just by axing all the other departments which account for the remaining $.48 trillion making up the 2015 fiscal outlay total of $3.9 trillion.

Let's start with the Education Dept., $76 billion, then International Assistance Programs, $22 billion.

Ka-ching! Ka-ching! You're 20% of the way there, just like that.

See how easy that was?

Paul Ryan, who voted for CROMNIBUS, is just fine with the budget deal and the cowardly Freedom Caucus will still support him for Speaker

Paul Ryan, quoted in Politico, here:

"[U]nder new management we are not going to do the people's business this way. We are up against a deadline — that's unfortunate. But going forward we can't do the people's business (this way). As a conference we should've been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward."

Sure, sure Paul. It'll be business as usual under you, too.

To Paul Ryan, conservatism means preserving Medicare for future generations, no going back on gays in the military, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Under Paul Ryan's "conservatism", if you lose, nothing will EVER be rolled back. And that includes the spending.

His expressions of outrage are simply red meat thrown to his Neanderthals.

JUST WORDS!

Charles Cook embraces the impotence of contemporary conservatism faced with Donald Trump

Where else but in National Review here, the locus of conservatism as ineffectual cult and ideology, which finds it impossible to revolt against anything except for the rebels:

"As it happens, Trump’s critics do grasp the appeal [of revolt]. What they do not do, however, is act upon it in this manner. The temptation to deliver a bloody nose to one’s ideological enemies is a human and comprehensible one, by no means limited in its allure to the disgruntled part of the Republican primary electorate. But temptation and reasonable conduct are two separate things entirely, and they should always be treated as such. Can one understand the instinct that is on display? Sure. Can one look beneath the surface and do anything other than despair? I’m afraid not. Such as they are, the explanations provided by Trump’s discordant choir are entirely risible and easily dismantled. Great, you’re annoyed! But then what?"

He's obviously proud of it. In 1776 he'd be called a royalist.

Was taking up arms against England "reasonable conduct"? Only a Catholic sensibility could fail to grasp the point. "But then what?" Well, a long war of several years, full of privations and without guaranty of success, followed by another long period of several years preparing for and culminating in a constitutional convention, during which local and colonial institutions were strong enough to support the absence of a centralized framework. The same is still true today, if only the locals more frequently told the federal courts to go to hell, as the Kentucky county clerk recently did.

By definition, an ideology ought to have some ideas in it which form a system, and should be, when all is said and done, unrealistic. That pretty much describes American conservatism since forever: unable to roll back anything, including the income tax, direct election of Senators, universal suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the enormous regulatory code, and unable to permanently refound the country on any constitutional principles, say, of limited government or separation of powers. Conservatism has a massive record of zero achievement while liberalism's untruths keep marching on like tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Trump's camp, meanwhile, thinks three modest things: the way to make America great again is to restore law and order by starting with enforcing its borders and putting an end to illegal immigration, to bring jobs back to Americans by reforming the tax code, developing energy independence, cutting wasteful spending and punishing unpatriotic corporations who profit from exporting jobs, and to rebuild the military to protect freedom at home and for our friends and allies abroad.

It takes near religious nuttery to call the proponent of these measures "a self-interested narcissist and serial heretic whose entirely inchoate political platform bends cynically to the demands of the moment."

To understand Trump, it takes a village . . . of Protestants.

The libertarian free-traders in both parties have killed the American middle class: Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama

From Patrick J. Buchanan, here:

The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.

And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”

The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?

--------------------------------------------------------

I've checked Buchanan's math and he's exaggerating a bit. The total is precisely $9.5 trillion . . . if you go back as far as 1982 under Reagan, but you get the point.

Liberal WaPo defends economist who says middle class is just fine because of . . . transfer payments!

Where have I heard this before?

Consider The Washington Post, here:

"CBO saw a dramatic difference in middle class income gains because it captures information that tax records miss, such as income from transfer programs such as Social Security and Medicare, [economist Stephen J.] Rose said."

A libertarian made this same argument to me very recently: that the middle class is intact if you count transfer payments made under the tax code.

For a libertarian to argue with a straight face that the middle class is intact because of income redistribution is an offense to capitalism. To be middle class from the purely economic point of view is to have achieved a level of economic independence and status not shared by the lower class. It is symbolized by home ownership, and by that new car smell every few years. Dependence on government transfer payments to maintain such status does nothing but obscure the truth of what is really going on.

This is consistent with the wider practice of economic liberalism in our time, which is similarly designed to hide the truth while posing as its custodian at the same time.

Mark-to-market accounting rules have been changed since April 2009 under Financial Accounting Standards Board rule 157, making price discovery of many "assets" nearly impossible. Circumstances became catastrophic under the old rule during 2008, so the solution was to change the rule. Call it moving the goal posts.

The Fed, acting as the Board's tag team wrestling partner, through QE has been buying up the crappy assets of the banks and transferring them to its own balance sheet in order to hide the truth of their crappiness and restore the banks to health. At the same time the Fed makes war against the free market with its repression of interest rates to the zero bound, driving up the value of risk assets, especially housing, stocks, bonds and commodities while punishing savers and aspirants to the middle class. It's not a coincidence that this helps only the elites, who cannot continue to spend money they don't have unless they can borrow it on the cheap.

A truly conservative economic universe, that is, one aligned with reality, would not permit any of this. 

Too bad we don't live there anymore. Libertarians shouldn't pretend that we do.