Friday, March 03, 2023


‘Taxachusetts’ surprise

More than one surprise below.

* As Attorney General, Maura T. Healey was notable for a raft of lawsuits against the Trump administration so any degree of conservatism from her is surprising.

* Someone in a Northern State has finally taken notice of people voting with their feet and moving South. She has acknowledged that tax is a big driver of that and done something about it. NYC has also become tax conscious over their big flow -- to Boca Raton, mostly. It is a bit sad that people have to up sticks just to keep more of what they have earned.

* The response from the Left is revealing. I and others have often said that the Left is not trying to lift up the poor. Their real motive is to punish the rich. And, on cue, the Left have wailed about the Healey tax cuts. Why? because it would give "an enormous windfall to the richest members of our society". Who cares about the poor?



Massachusetts’s new Democratic governor is proposing something her party rarely does: a large tax cut for wealthy individuals, businesses, and families in the state.

Business groups and budget hawks — once fearful of Governor Healey’s liberal leanings — have praised her effort, with the conservative Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance calling the proposal a “welcome surprise.”

Ms. Healey was elected last November after serving for eight years as the state’s attorney general. Just eight weeks into her term, she has proposed the largest tax cut since the 1990s in order to make the state more competitive and hospitable to families, high earners, and corporations.

The three pillars of the plan are an increase in the estate tax threshold, a cut in short-term capital gains taxes by more than half, and a tax credit for children and seniors.

In a statement announcing her plan, Ms. Healey said she wants to attract new businesses and make the Bay State more affordable for its residents. It delivers “relief to those who need it most and makes reforms that will attract and retain more businesses and residents to our great state,” she said.

“Governor Healey has taken a positive first step with this tax proposal,” the statement from Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance said. “The reform of our estate tax in particular is much needed to remedy our state from its outlier status,” adding that the tax “certainly contributes to the outflow of taxpayers from our state.”

The plan is made possible by strong revenue growth in recent years, a trajectory that is expected to continue. Between 2021 and 2022, the Bay State saw tax revenue increase by 21 percent, and the state now enjoys a budget surplus of about $5 billion. The previous administration sent more than $3 billion in tax rebates to Massachusetts taxpayers.

Currently, Massachusetts taxes estates worth more than $1 million after a person’s death. Oregon is the only other state to tax estates worth that amount. In all, nine states tax estates at higher thresholds and 39 states do not tax them at all.

Ms. Healey wants to raise that threshold to $3 million. Her plan is even more ambitious than a proposal from Democratic legislators last year, which would have raised the threshold to $2 million.

A longtime Democratic fundraiser and former Boston city council member, Larry DiCara, told the Sun that the tax relief plan will make Massachusetts more competitive.

“The most important piece is bringing the estate tax in line with the rest of the nation. We have the lowest threshold for the estate tax of any state. As a result, anyone who has a house in Hingham,” a wealthy suburb, “is subject to it” after the homeowner passes away, Mr. DiCara said.

Ms. Healey’s capital gains tax cut is a carbon copy of the plan offered by her Republican predecessor, Charlie Baker. If adopted, the short-term capital gains tax would be slashed to 5 percent from 12 percent.

A key pillar of her campaign was a tax credit for children, but her new proposal goes even further than her campaign pledge. The plan includes a $600 a month tax credit for any child under the age of 13 and for any dependent senior over the age of 65.

Currently, Massachusetts offers a $300 a month tax credit for children under the age of 6, and a $250 tax credit for children between the ages of 6 and 17.

The proposal also includes increases in tax deductions for renters and low-income seniors, as well as increased funding for schools, transportation, and housing.

In total, the tax cut would be even larger than the plan offered by Mr. Baker last year. He came to the negotiating table with a proposal for $693 million in tax relief. Ms. Healey’s tax plan would cost $742 million this year, and about $1 billion annually beginning next fiscal year.

According to a nonpartisan journal, the World Population Review, Massachusetts ranks seventh among the states for total tax burden, which is a measure of all income, property, sales, and excise taxes paid by citizens.

Ms. Healey’s proposal leaves some of her liberal allies disappointed. During her 2022 campaign for governor, she never mentioned changes to the estate tax or the capital gains tax, though she did highlight the child tax credit during her run.

A liberal public policy organization, Raise Up Massachusetts, questioned the tax cuts. “We are deeply concerned that proposed changes to the estate tax and short-term capital gains tax would deliver an enormous windfall to the richest members of our society,” the group said in a statement.

It said the estate tax “would give a few thousand of the wealthiest families in the state a six-figure tax cut” and the capital gains tax reform would “reward day traders” for “risky financial maneuvering.”

Mr. DiCara said the tax relief bill is exactly what the state needs. “The renters credit and the child tax credit make tons of sense to me,” he said. “I’m a big fan of Healey’s. I think she’s going to govern from the middle, and I think she’s going to be a great governor.”

*************************************************

Biden Choking Prosperity With Big-Spending Industrial Policy

We’ve been talking about President Biden’s regulatory war against America’s economy, with a big hat tip to the Wall Street Journal editorial page and American Action Forum for reminding everyone that in two years the Bidens have slapped on 517 regulatory actions totaling roughly $318 billion in economic costs.

Bad as that is, the socialist central planners in Washington have another 311 regs in the pipeline for another nearly $200 billion in costs. That’s well over $500 billion of regulatory costs on American business. Just think of that: $500 billion.

What does that mean? Lower profits, lower wages, less productivity, and a crushing blow to small business.

A chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, Kevin Hassett, told us last night that if we got rid of all the new regs, you could conceivably increase real GDP by as much as 1 percent over the longer term. Think of it.

If you extended the Trump tax cuts, or even better went for a modified flat-tax of 20 percent for personal and corporate income, the Tax Foundation figures you could add almost another half percent in the long run, and that would get you well on your way to a 3.5 percent growth rate — which is what we had between 1947 and 2000, before it slumped to only 1.8 percent over the last 22 years.

Think of the prosperity: Not only more growth from the supply side of the economy, but less inflation. Think about a happy blue-collar middle class family workforce. Think how much easier it would be to slow federal spending, balance the budget, and stop the debt assault.

Yet now we have to contend with the exact opposite.

New information from the so-called Chips act — remember that industrial policy aimed at the semiconductor industry? It will cost $284 billion, and Republicans and Democrats signed up for it.

It’s the exact opposite of my 3.5 percent growth dream. Know what’s in there? Mandated day care, Davis Bacon pay scales, sharing corporate profits with the federal government. Also, total coordination with unions and National Environmental Policy Act compliance, where the Bidens repeal the Trump reforms and now stretch out permits basically for years and years spanning every agency in government.

So, in other words, nothing new will be built.

Between the greenies and the unions and the social welfarists and various interest groups — oh, yes, did I forget that one semiconductor requirement will be diversity, equity, and inclusion? Of course it will be.

Nothing passes the Bidens without DEI or some crazy woke idea that will stop investment, stop new jobs, stop productivity, and stop progress.

This is a perfect illustration of the stupidity of setting industrial policy through massive spending, and as I said it was authorized by a third of the Republican senators along with all the Democrats.

You know, in Washington you get what you pay for. Big spending bills nowadays lead to big woke policies, and that in turn blocks everything. Steve Forbes many months ago labeled this “modern socialism” through the regulatory state.

The Biden central planners working overtime had their way with free enterprise last summer. Republican senators who voted for this monstrosity should still be ashamed of themselves. Big-spending industrial policy never works.

Save America. Stop industrial policy. Promote growth and prosperity, not central-planning modern socialism.

******************************************************

The Woke Wrecking Machine

Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous.

Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result - history's prescription for civilizational decline.

If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes.

Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful.

Soviet-style, wokeism mandates strict ideological party-line narratives under the cover of "science." No wonder a woke government lied that requiring vaccines would prevent both infection and infectiousness.

Woke substitutes race for class in its eternal neo-Marxist quest to divide permanently the nation along racial lines, between victims and victimizers.

Yet wokeism recently has embarrassed itself as never before.

Take the COVID pandemic.

The Department of Energy has joined the FBI and is now attributing the origins of the pandemic to a leak of a likely engineered virus from the top-security virology lab in Wuhan, China.

Wokesters had long suppressed that reality, demonizing any who rejected its orthodox lies and spoke a larger truth: A dystopic China is not our global partner in greening the planet. Criticizing Stalinist China is not "racist." China is not building a progressive society that is a model for others.

The ongoing environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment revealed more woke moral bankruptcy.

Ostensibly the ensuing toxic spill and noxious plume have poisoned a poor and working-class small town. It should have galvanized the old Democratic Party that once voiced loud support for all green causes and championed the lower American classes.

But woke ended all that - substituting racial chauvinism for class concerns and ideology for genuine worry over the environment.

Woke dogma mandates that pollution and poverty are no longer concerns - if they affect the white poor who are stereotyped collectively as privileged victimizers.

Wokesters insisted that California is the greatest casualty of "climate change" defined as permanent drought.

Purported climate change required radical new bureaucratic rules and antidemocratic mandates over irrigation supplies, ground water, and contracted water deliveries from public reservoirs.

But then it rained. And it snowed. And it became terribly cold in supposedly scorching California. Southern California is blanketed in snow.

Even so, for much of this cold, wet winter, state officials continued to claim the man-made drought was in full force. But finally, the most recent frigid, wet weather strangled the woke drought - and with it the credibility of our climate change Cassandras.

Americans sympathize with Ukraine's plight as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to destroy its autonomy. But woke brooked no deviation from the party line that Ukraine's Volodomyr Zelenskyy is a saint, while Russia is near bankrupt due to sanctions, and doomed to lose the war.

Accordingly, the United States was obligated to give Ukraine a veritable blank check given Kyiv's commitment to freedom. Zelenskyy's team now even talks of a victorious Ukrainian armored counteroffensive into Moscow's Red Square.

This week, however, we are learning the Russian economy is nearly as strong now as it was before the war. It has mobilized 700,000 troops to ensure that eastern Ukraine becomes a Verdun-like killing field where tens of thousands more will be ground up.

Ukraine bars dissidents and maintains a government media monopoly. And the more President Joe Biden promises another $2-3 billion in biweekly aid, the more Zelenskyy acts as if it is a pittance given what supposedly stingy Americans should be capable of supplying.

Meanwhile, at home, new woke protocols mandate race as essential rather than incidental to the human experience. Supposedly such fixations will heal racial wounds.

Under the new reparatory and compensatory diversity, equity, and inclusion rules, those deemed non-white were to be hired and admitted to colleges in greater numbers than their demographics. Even the old mandated proportional representation quotas were no longer enough.

But racial chauvinism, nonstop talk of reparations, and the new campus segregation have not resulted in better racial relations.

Polls show that there are greater racial tensions than ever before.

Data on interracial and hate crimes show even sharper racial disproportionalities. The incidence of both Black violent criminal perpetrators and Black crime victims are near historical highs.

Woke policies of no cash bail, downgrading felonies, and no jail time only spiked violent lawlessness.

Our elite universities are now fully woke. Almost weekly an embarrassing story further erodes their credibility and reputation.

Ridiculous lists of taboo words are issued on woke campuses, barring incendiary words like "American" and "immigrant."

Bragging of segregated dorms, graduations, and safe spaces recalls Jim Crow, not woke racial utopias.

Grades and standards are deemed counterrevolutionary, even as incompetent graduates increasingly fail to impress employers.

Someday wokeism will disappear because it is inherently nihilistic and cannibalistic.

But in the meantime, Americans should end it now before it ends America first.

****************************************************

'Why does Hershey's hate women?': Fans threaten to boycott chocolate maker after it puts a trans woman's face on its candy wrappers for International Women's Day

Hours after Hershey's Canadian brand launched its HER for SHE campaign in conjunction with International Women's Day, social media activists began calling for a boycott of the iconic chocolate maker.

The ad features trans woman and activist Fae Johnstone as one of the five faces of the campaign. Johnstone and five others will adorn five different wrappers during March.

This is the third year that Hershey's has marketed a product to celebrate International Women's Day. Its 2022 campaign was fronted by woke actress and comedian Mindy Kaling.

'Why does Hershey's hate women?' pondered one conservative Twitter account on Thursday.

While Johnstone, the executive director of consulting business Wisdom2Action, tweeted on Wednesday that the was 'honored' to be in the campaign. By Thursday, Boycott Hershey's was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in United States and Canada.

The other women featured in the ad are Kelicia Massala, the founder of Girl up Quebec, Naila Moloo, a climate technology scientist, Rita Audi, a gender and education equality activist and an Indigenous rights activist Autumn Peltier.

According to a post from Hershey's Canada, the campaign will 'shine a light on the women and girls who inspire us every day.' Hershey's has partnered with the North Carolina-based Girls on the Run this year for the promotion.

The confectionary giant will be donating $10,000 to each the respective causes represented in the ads and $30,000 to Girl Up.

'You get the feeling that these companies always despised women — they were just waiting for the right moment to stick it to us. Here's the thing about real women, Hershey's. We have long memories,' tweeted Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

While Oli London, who announced his plans to detransition in 2022, tweeted: 'A biological MAN fronts the new Hershey's campaign celebrating women for International Women's Day. This is misogyny at its finest! A real slap in the face to actual women!'

*************************************************

Australia: The authoritarian Left goes nuts over a conservative speech

Free speech and debate are important cornerstones of democracy. History demonstrates that they are the first to go when bad, experimental agendas are supported and common sense turns to madness.

This past week, newly minted Victorian MP Moira Deeming used her maiden speech to highlight the need for critical legislative reforms, including restoring sex-based rights for women and girls, amending the Sex Work Discrimination Act 2022 to ensure minors and babies are not permitted in brothels, and an inquiry into the ethics of medical gender affirmation practices on minors.

All perfectly reasonable to anyone with a straight moral compass, it has sent the extreme left in the media and political class into meltdown.

An onslaught of tabloid-style articles followed using slurs such as ‘extreme’ and ‘far-right’ questioning how Deeming ended up in parliament in the first place. Hint: democracy.

Conservatives are no more ‘far-right extremists’ than progressives are Stalin-style communists.

The media attacking and inciting hatred towards Deeming for her faith is Christophobic and no different from antisemitism or Islamophobia.

The real threat to our society and culture comes from the authoritarian left.

Leader of the Greens Samantha Ratnam took to Twitter to describe Deeming’s speech as ‘utterly vile’ and something ‘the Greens won’t stand for’. It’s not the first time Ratnam has pulled out such antics against a political opponent, and it won’t be the last. However, it is clear that when policies are indefensible, they are off the table for debate.

The authoritarian left and their allies in the media have succeeded in running aggressive campaigns across a range of issues with very little, if any, debate by verbally beating their opponents into silence. Increasingly, if you do not support the status quo, your employment or business will be targeted by anonymous online mobs, your family threatened, and you will become untouchable by society. Deeming is an example of this cancel culture, having to sacrifice her teaching career to speak out against the radical politicisation of the school curriculum. Activists now aim to see her kicked out of the Liberal Party and, in the long run, Parliament.

You might not have thought so reading the clickbait headlines in the Herald Sun, but Deeming has been a prominent campaigner across many issues for several years. Her views were widely and publicly known before she was elected in a democratic Liberal Party preselection followed by an election from the public at the ballot box.

While not everyone will agree with everything she stands for, there are significant issues facing ordinary Australians today, particularly women and children, and a shortage of advocates strong enough to withstand the lynch mob for speaking out, which makes her an appealing elected representative.

The authoritarian left fails to see that the public is seeing through the propaganda of ‘tolerance and inclusiveness’. It wants nothing less than the unconditional acceptance and endorsement of all their bad ideas. Anything that stands in the way, such as free speech, freedom of faith, thought, and debate, must go.

Males, let alone male rapists, do not belong in female prisons, and children should not be permitted anywhere near the sex industry, commercial or residential. Given the increasing cases of transition regrets, especially amongst females, there should be an inquiry into the ethics of the ‘affirmation only’ approach to transitioning minors with gender dysphoria, especially when it includes irreversible medical procedures and drugs.

These positions are not outrageous, bigoted, or phobic. They are common sense.

History will condemn those who fail to act, particularly those in positions of power or with a platform.

Ex-MP Fiona Patten accused Deeming of ‘not telling the truth’ when Deeming revealed that babies 18 months and under are permitted in commercial brothels. Minors of any age are allowed in residential brothels.

‘Unless Deeming has a crystal ball and can see what WorkSafe and other regulatory bodies are planning to implement, she’s guessing. Brothels will remain adult-only spaces.’ Ms Patten said.

The Age failed to report that Deeming is correct. It is written into section 47 of the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act 2022, of which Patten is the architect.

Like all bad ideas written into policy, when the public scrutinise the legislation, they often find it morally repugnant.

Despite what the media would have the public believe, there is strong support for Deeming in the public domain. For every nasty tweet and tabloid-style article, there’s an outpouring of support from feminists, men and women from all walks of life, and political persuasions. The loud cheers and standing ovation after her speech showed how strongly her message resonated across the chambers of parliament.

As Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price commented after Daniel Andrews offered his criticism, ‘Mark my words, this will be the first of many attempts of character assassination. That’s all this misogynist has when faced with a strong woman who undermines his leadership with reality.’

Left-wing authoritarians do not care if you are a left-wing feminist, conservative or libertarian; if you question the status quo, you are a threat. They will throw whatever label they can, hoping one will stick and cause damage.

By and large, men escape the scrutiny that women like Deeming and Senator Price face. Strong male leadership is absent in parliament on many of these issues, with a small number of exceptions. It is women who are leading the charge, unafraid to put a spotlight on the ugly truth our legislators are desperate to hide as they implement their radical policy agendas. I hope these women inspire courage in other like-minded MPs hiding nervously in the shadows, to rise up and do the job they have been elected to do in accordance with their convictions, rather than pacifying the noisy few and appeasing the media (all in an effort to retain a pay cheque at our expense).

Like a growing number of women in state and federal Parliament, Deeming has answered the call to stand up against the gross injustice and erosion of rights inflicted by the authoritarian left despite the consequences. For the sake of our children’s future and to safeguard the hard-earned rights of women and girls, so must we all.

****************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************

No comments: