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Real Patriots Cut Taxes, Not Raise Them
- By Stephen Moore
On Tax Day this year, about a dozen left-wing millionaires joined with some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress for a Washington, D.C., press conference. The luminaries included Abigail Disney, Walt Disney's granddaughter, and former BlackRock whiz kid Morris Pearl.
The group argued that it wants to pay more taxes and urged new tax laws with a tax rate as high as 90% for the super-rich due to concerns, it said, about having too much money, which evidently contributes to income inequality.
Regulatory Octopus Is Strangling Our Economy
- By Stephen Moore
Every schoolkid knows -- or used to know -- that the United States has three branches of government. At least that's what the textbooks say.
But really, we have four branches of government.
That's because Congress -- the legislative branch -- has for decades delegated lawmaking authority to the unconstitutional fourth branch of the U.S. government: independent regulatory agencies. By some estimates, there are more than 300 of these agencies sticking their nose into every aspect of American life and business, from what kind of car you can buy to the temperature setting on your thermostat to what you can build on your own private property.
The Left Has Killed Our Great Cities
- By Stephen Moore
Mark down Tuesday, April 4, as the night Chicago died.
That's when we learned that Second City voters narrowly elected Brandon Johnson as their next mayor. This is a city that was flattened during the reign of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost in the first round of voting for Chicago mayor because she didn't finish in one of the top two spots. Lightfoot, elected in 2019 after a career as a federal prosecutor who then held several appointed positions in Chicago, shut down the city for more than a year during COVID-19. She also bankrupted small businesses, allowed rioters to burn down whole neighborhoods, presided over the worst crime wave in 50 years and let the schools go to hell.
Hey, Uncle Sam: Stop Paying People for Not Working
- By Stephen Moore
A policy question these days that has befuddled federal lawmakers is why so many millions of people have not returned to the workplace in the post-COVID-19 era. The labor force participation rate among employable adults is near a record low today. There are at least 2 million to 4 million employable adults who could and should be working but aren't.
Very few people with even minimal skills can credibly say they can't find a job. Employers report some 10 million job openings. Small business owners say their biggest problem is finding competent workers.
There are many explanations for why so many people aren't working -- fear of COVID-19, the skills mismatch, more people taking early retirement, and so on. But a major factor is that the federal government is back to doing what it did in the 1970s and 1980s. The welfare state today is paying people not to work -- even a single hour.
Michigan Is Headed Back to Rust Belt Poverty
- By Stephen Moore
Since the early days of Henry Ford, Michigan was the proud symbol of America's industrial might.
But then, starting in the 1970s, things went south -- in part because of the might of the unions that ran the state's political machine. That's when Michigan transitioned into the sad symbol of closed factories: the American "Rust Belt." Flint, Michigan, became a ghost town.
Honey, Joe Biden Just Shrunk Our Pension
- By Stephen Moore
President Joe Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible.
Why should you care? Because Biden was, in effect, saying it was permissible for fund managers, who have control of trillions of dollars in pension accounts, to take into consideration a company's ESG score (related to how it stands on racial justice, climate change and LGBT issues) when they decide where to invest the money.
Death Taxes Are Immoral. Even Worse, They Don't Work.
- By Stephen Moore
"I have no respect for the passion of equality," Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of America's great jurists, once declared, "which seems to me merely idealizing envy."
But envy, and its sister vice, greed, are very much back in fashion today when it comes to the progressive Left. Just listen to President Joe Biden, who wants $2 trillion of new taxes, mostly paid by millionaires, so that the rich will "pay their fair share." In seven blue states, including California, Illinois and New York, new wealth taxes and higher income tax rates on people such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Taylor Swift have been proposed by liberal lawmakers.
America's $100 Billion Climate Change Flop
- By Stephen Moore
For at least the last 20 years, politicians in Washington, at the behest of green energy groups, have spent some $100 billion of taxpayer money to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How is that going for us so far?
A recent Associated Press story, based on the latest data on global carbon emissions, provides a pretty accurate report card: "Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached a Record High in 2022."
The article tells us: "Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power. Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)"
Scholars Rank Biggest Spending Presidents as the Greatest
- By Stephen Moore
Before President Joe Biden entered the White House, he consulted with several prominent historians about how to be a great commander in chief. Their answer: Grow government. Spend, spend, spend. Don't worry about blowing up the debt.
It was the worst possible advice, and that meeting no doubt contributed to our economic calamity.
So, I wasn't surprised to read about a poll of more than 100 of America's most prominent academic historians who rated the greatest and the worst presidents. This is a farcical popularity contest that the Siena College Research Institute conducts every few years.
It's Now or Never for School Choice Everywhere
- By Stephen Moore
This story could bring tears to your eyes. In Baltimore, Maryland, there are 23 schools in which not one single student tested "proficient in math."
Can we all agree these are schools that aren't proficient in teaching math -- or just about any course, for that matter?
A Fox News investigation calculated that Baltimore spends an average of $21,000 per student. How could the teachers unions possibly spend that much money and accomplish almost no learning?
What if Federal Workers Never Showed Up for Work and No One Missed Them?
- By Stephen Moore
This is one of the greatest federal government scandals of all time. Many hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been getting a full-time paycheck from Uncle Sam (meaning from all of us) without showing up for work for three years now. They don't call it Club Fed for nothing.
To be fair, just because an employee is working remotely doesn't mean they aren't working. Only a little more than half of private sector workers are actually in the office these days -- although, with each passing day, private workers are returning to work sites. But in the public sector, the percentage of remote workers remains much higher than that. The Federal Times news outlet reports that at the end of 2022, only about 1 in 3 federal bureaucrats were on the job in the office.
End the COVID-19 'Emergency' -- Now
- By Stephen Moore
Almost every decision that has been made in Washington and in the states that deals with COVID-19 has been about politics and money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and not about public health.
COVID-19 is a deadly virus that has killed over a million Americans -- almost all over the age of 65. But from day one, the overreaction and misinformation from politicians and the public health industrial complex was a campaign to embarrass and discredit then-President Donald Trump. It became an excuse to get Trump out of office.
Proposed Airline Merger Would Bring More Competition and Lower Fares
- By Stephen Moore
If you want to see a classic case of how President Joe Biden's regulatory tendencies are strangling the U.S. economy and raising prices, look no further than the latest Justice Department efforts to kill an airline merger that is pro-consumer.
JetBlue has its sights on merging with a smaller and financially ailing airline, Spirit.
JetBlue's management believes the synergies between the two airlines will save over $300 million in costs. Spirit's shareholders (i.e., the airline's owners) have voted to approve the merger.
It's Official: Trump's Tax Cuts Paid for Themselves
- By Stephen Moore
How many times have you heard President Joe Biden or Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) berate the Trump tax cuts as "a giveaway to the rich"?
Biden and congressional Democrats now want to let expire major planks of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, former President Donald Trump's signature domestic achievement, particularly the incentives for American businesses to invest more here at home.
Biden's ESG Investment Rules Threaten Your Retirement Savings
- By Stephen Moore
President Joe Biden's Labor Department recently announced a new rule that will permit money managers to play politics with trillions of dollars of people's retirement savings.
The administration is pushing environmental, social and governance investing, which allows retirement fund managers to select stocks of companies based on their positions on social and environmental issues.
Put simply, retirement savings will be used as leverage to force companies to reduce their carbon emissions and establish racial and gender quotas and other social justice fads completely unrelated to securing a high return on workers' lifetime savings.
US Big Three Auto Companies Commit to Making Cars That People Don't Want
- By Stephen Moore
I grew up in a household with parents who were of the Greatest Generation. They lived and shouldered through the Great Depression, and then their lives and families were thrown into turmoil on Dec. 7, 1941. My grandfather worked for the War Department in Washington, D.C., and during World War II, my father served in the Pacific Theater.
Both my mother and father made a solemn vow that as long as they lived, they would never buy a German or a Japanese car. No matter how well they were made. They were the enemies. They were the ones who killed nearly half a million Americans. Period.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: "Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy." To find out more about Stephen Moore and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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