MS. POST REASSESSES

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN LAW, MEDIA

Seeking to mitigate its possible liability in the defamation lawsuit brought by Nicholas Sandmann, I believe, the Washington Post has published this “Editor’s note related to Lincoln Memorial incident” (with links omitted here):

A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict. The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos. Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: “ Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed”; “ Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration”; “ Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident.”

A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.

Rick Moran comments: “Basically, the Post is admitting it made an error. But I don’t see an apology, do you?”

However, consider this. Sandmann’s lawsuit was filed on February 19, 2019. The Post’s editor’s note was published on March 1, ten days later.

What the Post is doing here may be governed by the possible application of this Kentucky statute to the case. Under the statute, a newspaper can mitigate defamation damages if it publishes “a fair summary” of plaintiff’s statement of the facts following a demand made 10 days prior to commencement of the lawsuit. My guess is that the Post didn’t want to take a chance it might lose the benefit of the statute in this case.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/ms-post-reassesses.php

California’s Rendezvous With Reality

California’s Rendezvous With Reality
By Victor Davis Hanson

Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.

Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.

But how long will they retain such confidence?

California’s 40 million residents depend on less than 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California’s highest tier of earners tops out at the nation’s highest rate of 13.3 percent.


In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000—a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

If even a few thousand of the state’s 1 percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income.

During the 2011-16 California drought, politicians and experts claimed that global warming had permanently altered the climate, and that snow and rain would become increasingly rare in California. As a result, long-planned low-elevation reservoirs, designed to store water during exceptionally wet years, were considered all but useless and thus were never built.


Then, in 2016 and 2017, California received record snow and rainfall—and the windfall of millions of acre-feet of runoff was mostly let out to sea. Nothing since has been learned.

California has again been experiencing rain and cold that could approach seasonal records. The state has been soaked by some 18 trillion gallons of rain in February alone. With still no effort to expand California’s water-storage capacity, millions of acre-feet of runoff are once again cascading out to sea (and may be sorely missed next year).

The inability to build reservoirs is especially tragic given that the state’s high-speed-rail project has gobbled up more than $5 billion in funds without a single foot of track laid. The total cost soared from an original $40 billion promise to a projected $77 billion. To his credit, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget catastrophe, canceled the statewide project while allowing a few miles of the quarter-built Central Valley “track to nowhere” to be finished.

For years, high-speed rail has drained the state budget of transportation funds that might have easily updated nightmarish stretches of the Central Valley’s Highway 99, or ensured that the nearby ossified Amtrak line became a modern two-track line.

California politicians vie with each other to prove their open-borders bona fides in an effort to appeal to the estimated 27 percent of Californians who were not born in the United States.

But the health, educational and legal costs associated with massive illegal immigration are squeezing the budget. About a third of the California budget goes to the state’s Medicare program, Medicaid. Half the state’s births are funded by Medicaid, and in nearly a third of those state-funded births, the mother is an undocumented immigrant.

California is facing a perfect storm of homelessness. Its labyrinth of zoning and building regulations discourages low-cost housing. Its generous welfare benefits, non-enforcement of vagrancy and public health laws, and moderate climate draw in the homeless. Nearly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in the state, and nearly one in five live below the poverty line.

The result is that tens of thousands of people live on the streets and sidewalks of the state’s major cities, where primeval diseases such as typhus have reappeared.

California’s progressive government seems clueless how to deal with these issues, given that solutions such as low-cost housing and strict enforcement of health codes are seen as either too expensive or politically incorrect.

In sum, California has no margin for error.

Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but federally deductible state income taxes.

No more. Californians may have once derided the state’s 1 percent as selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid before.

That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe streets.

A California reckoning is on the horizon, and it may not be pretty.
https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/02/27/californias-rendezvous-with-reality/

A MILQUETOAST SUPREME COURT?

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN BRETT KAVANAUGH, SUPREME COURT

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the Supreme Court was ducking important issues about the rights of gay and transgender individuals. The questions it has been avoiding are (1) whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual preference and (2) whether it prohibits discrimination based on transgender status.

Together, these two questions affect the rights of millions, if not tens of millions, of Americans. And it’s not as if, by avoiding them, the Supreme Court strikes a blow against judicial activism. Lower courts deciding these issues. The circuit courts of appeal are divided on both questions.

The Supreme Court has before it cases through which it can answer definitively both questions. Yet, when I wrote about this matter in January, the Court had repeatedly “relisted” these cases. When a case is “relisted,” it’s set for reconsideration at the Justices’ next Conference. When a case is repeatedly relisted, the Court is kicking the can down the road.

Since I wrote my January post, the Court has relisted the cases in question a few more times. It seems determined to keep ducking the issues they present.

What cases has the Court been deciding? Few that are important enough for you likely to have heard about unless you’re a law professor or an appellate court/Supreme Court practitioner.

Yesterday, the Court decided that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(f) is not subject to equitable tolling. Good to know, but hardly momentous.

Today, the Court decided that farmers and fisherman from India may be able to sue the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in a federal court because the IFC is not absolutely immune from suit. This outcome may be cause for celebration in India, but it’s inconsequential for Americans.

In two cases of greater importance, the Court today veered leftward in the area of criminal law. In a 6-3 decision, it refined standards regarding ineffective assistance of counsel claims and criminals who sign waivers of appeals. The Court determined that a “presumption of prejudice” applies if the lawyer was “ineffective” even when a criminal signs an appeal waiver.

Justice Sotomayor’s opinion was joined by the three other liberals, plus Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh.

In addition, the Court ruled 5-3 that the Eighth Amendment may prohibit executing a prisoner who suffers from dementia (the prisoner in question has been death row for 30 years) but is not insane or delusional. The Chief Justice voted with the liberals. Kavanaugh did not participate because the case was argued before he joined the Court.

Are we stuck with a milquetoast Supreme Court? Maybe. It ducks hugely important issues as to which conservatives may have a majority, doesn’t seem hesitant to decide ones where the liberals have five or more votes, and appears partial to deciding cases where ideology plays no part.

To be fair, come June we’ll see some big decisions. But for those who follow the Court closely, this Term might end up being as noteworthy for the issues the Court refused to decide as for the ones it decided.

This is not what Trump voters expected when they voted for a candidate who made the Supreme Court one of his main issues in 2016.

What went wrong? Two things, I believe, one of which Trump couldn’t do anything about.

First, Chief Justice Roberts wants to avoid controversy, so as to “protect” the Supreme Court. God forbid that the “conservative” majority issue too many conservative decisions. The media might start to question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Second, Justice Kavanaugh wants to avoid controversy. The rumor mill has it that he plans to “lay low” during his first year due to all the controversy that surrounded his confirmation. I can’t vouch for the truth of this rumor, but his behavior to date is consistent with it.

Kavanaugh can wait ten years. He’ll always be a lightning rod for the left and its media allies unless he turns out to be another Justice Kennedy (or maybe becoming another Justice Souter is required).

Chief Justice Roberts strikes me as the more principled of the two reluctant Justices. At least he’s protecting the interest (as he sees it) of an institution. Kavanaugh seems to be protecting only his own interest.

Do you think any Justices appointed by Democratic presidents would be behaving as Roberts and Kavanaugh are if there were five of them on the Supreme Court? I don’t either.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/02/a-milquetoast-supreme-court.php

Mainstream Media Blacks Out The Democrats’ Infanticide Vote

Mainstream Media Blacks Out The Democrats’ Infanticide Vote

There's no good way to spin the Democrats' vote. So many in the MSM simply ignored it.

By David Harsanyi

So I was going to have a little fun at the expense of CNN this morning, contrasting the news site’s headline for the Democrats’ gun restriction bill—“House to vote on guns background check bill with bipartisan support”—which has garnered exactly four Republican co-sponsors, with its headline for the Sen. Ben Sasse’s anti-infanticide bill, which I was certain would be solely about the “GOP” despite having four Democrat Senators voting to move the bill forward. Turns out, it was even better.

There was nothing to contrast because, as far as I can tell, CNN doesn’t feature a single story on their website regarding the Democratic Party blocking of Sasse’s Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would have saved newborn babies who survive abortion attempts from negligent homicide.

CNN didn’t even bother producing one of those predictably prejudiced pieces, like the ones we saw in Politico or the Washington Post yesterday, mischaracterizing Sasse’s bill as “anti-abortion.” They didn’t bother with the “conservatives pounce!” stories like the Daily Beast or Vox. They didn’t bother, like so many others, to distract from the number of viable babies being aborted by stressing only 1.5 percent of the procedures are in post-20 weeks, rather than pointing out there are somewhere around 15,000 to 18,000 aborted every year. They just ignored it.

CNN features a long string of stories about Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen on the site—surely, legitimate news—but not one about a highly unpopular policy position that is supported by every Democratic Party presidential hopeful in the Senate. This issue that dominated the political discussions of around half the country yesterday was not worth a single piece from this unbiased, undeterred, truth seeking, information-gathering operation. I wonder why that is?

As far as we can tell as of this writing, in the 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. hours, CNN anchor Dave Briggs reported, not on the debate over the infanticide bill or the vote, but on a Trump tweet about the debate (the heroin of mainstream journalism):

President Trump is slashing Senate Democrats for blocking a Republican-sponsored abortion bill. The bill would punish any doctor who fails to provide medical care for a child born alive after an attempted abortion. Democrats filibuster denied the measure, the 60 votes needed for a final vote. The president tweeted, apparently from Air Force One that ‘The Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies after birth. This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress.’”

Would the network have mentioned the vote at all had Trump not tweeted about it? It’s also worth noting that CNN.com, one of the most popular news sites on the Internet, has far more eyeballs than CNN.  Most young people don’t watch cable news.

Anyway, I figured I would also check on MSNBC television. As far as I can tell, the network didn’t bother mentioning the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act a single time on TV yesterday. Its website doesn’t feature a single story about the bill or vote. That’s to be expected, I suppose.

Surely, I said, the august NBC News would have an article on such a divisive issue. “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act?” Nada. “Ben Sasse abortion?” Nada. Lots and lots of stories about Sasse’s criticism of the president, but no space on the internet for his legislation banning the termination of viable infants. There is a single line buried in Chuck Todd’s newsletterabout “Born Alive abortion bill” that, tellingly enough, links to a Wall Street Journal piece. How about ABC News? Nothing on “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors.” I did find a single buried wire story incorrectly headlined: “The Latest: Democrats block Senate GOP anti-abortion effort.” The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act, a bill name that so many journalists assiduously avoid, would not stop a single abortion.

Now, I will confess that the search tools for some of these sites are difficult to navigate, so I may have missed something. Clearly, however, most of them did their best interference for Democrats, who took an unconscionable vote this week that couldn’t be spun by the typical bias. Or put it this way, if Republicans had taken a vote that was deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans, you’d be hearing about it. Over and over again.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/27/mainstream-media-blacks-democrats-infanticide-vote/

Media Prove They Don’t Care About Violence Against Trump Supporters

Media Prove They Don’t Care About Violence Against Trump Supporters
By Donald Trump Jr.|


Whenever I open my mouth about the outrageous bias of our national news media, liberal journalists always seem to jump at the opportunity to prove me right.

When I went on “Fox and Friends” Monday to talk about the Jussie Smollett hoax, for instance, I pointed out how ridiculous it was for the actor to claim he was attacked by two men in MAGA hats on the streets of Chicago. I made a joke about how no one wore MAGA hats in downtown Chicago because they would get shot in “two seconds.”


No one watching the segment could possibly have believed that I meant you would literally be shot if you wear a MAGA hat in Chicago, but that’s how the media—in an obvious bad faith effort to make me look bad—reported my words. It’s even more upsetting that these are the same partisan hacks who reported the implausible lies of Jussie Smollett as Gospel truth and called anyone who questioned their narrative “far-right extremists” or worse.

But the shameless misrepresentation of my words in the press, is emblematic of the blasé attitude most media outlets exhibit towards violence against my father’s voters.

There are enough examples from Chicago alone to illustrate the inexcusable double standards of the national news media. In early 2016, my dad’s campaign had to cancel a major rally for the first time ever after Black Lives Matter and other extremist groups indiscriminately attacked both supporters who were trying to get into the UIC Pavillion to see my father speak and the police officers who were assigned to protect them.


How did the media report this? “Violence breaks out at Trump rally.”

That sort of deceptive headline reflected the media’s pattern throughout the campaign, and the practice continues right up to this day. When there’s violence against Trump supporters because of their political beliefs, the media will ignore it until they can’t, and then they’ll downplay it. If that fails, they’ll just proclaim that the Trump supporters had it coming to them because of the “climate of hate” that their political views create.

Consider last week’s attack on Hayden Williams, a conservative activist who got cold-cocked on the University of California-Berkeley campus while he was recruiting students to join a conservative organization. At first, CNN and the rest of the fake news media just ignored it.


Then, when the liberal media finally did get shamed into covering the Berkeley attack, they went with “allegedly attacked” headlines—despite the fact that two videos and one very ugly-looking black eye made it very clear what happened. They did the same thing with Kellyanne Conway when she was affronted by a protester, saying she only “claimed” to have been attacked.

Yet, the vast majority of news outlets didn’t see the need to include qualifiers such as “allegedly” or “claimed” in their coverage of Jussie Smollett’s case.

You see, when someone says Trump supporters committed a hate crime, the media thinks you can take that straight to the bank. Even though these “evil Trump supporter” stories are almost always complete fabrications, liberal reporters and editors write them uncritically and use them to whip up national hysteria again and again and again.

When people who hate President Trump engage in real, verifiable, politically motivated violence, the media aren’t nearly so interested. For every fake attack blamed on Trump supporters, there’s a real one committed against Trump supporters.

Just this weekend, a woman on Cape Cod, Massachusetts screamed at and hit a restaurant patron because he was wearing a MAGA hat. When the cops showed up, the attacker explained that she was the victim and that the man shouldn’t have been allowed to wear his hat. That may sound ridiculous, but, as we saw with the Covington Catholic kids, the mainstream media have basically the same attitude toward MAGA hats.

You see, even though I was being hyperbolic in my “Fox and Friends” interview, I wasn’t completely kidding about the unacceptable amount of violence Trump supporters have faced in Chicago.

On the Windy City’s West side, just days after my father won the election, a man who voted for him was savagely beaten and dragged from a car while people yelled “he voted Trump!” and “don’t vote Trump!”

Months later, a craven group of thugs live streamed themselves cutting and beating a mentally disabled 18-year-old while they told the camera “F*** Trump” and “F*** white people.”

These very real stories of political violence didn’t get nearly the attention that the mainstream media devoted to Jussie Smollett’s lies, which is precisely the point I was making with my joke about the dearth of MAGA hats on the streets of Chicago.

Somehow, I don’t think the people who twisted my words were actually intending to prove my point. But that’s exactly what they did.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/26/media-proves-my-point-again/

The Mueller and Inspector General Reports Should Be Released Simultaneously

The Mueller and Inspector General Reports Should Be Released Simultaneously

 

BY ROGER L. SIMON 

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Rep. Adam Schiff — a man whose love affair with the TV camera is legendary — is now utilizing his cherie amour and his new position as chair of the House Intelligence Committee to demand that, upon completion, the Mueller/Russia investigation report be published in its entirety — that is, with no redactions, emendations, or edits, for whatever purpose by the attorney general. He's even threatening to subpoena Mueller or sue the Justice Department if the full report is not released.

Notwithstanding his risible and tedious grandstanding, the congressman has a point, if only by attrition. Based on past performance, details of similar documents that were kept from public view would be leaked in around ten minutes anyway. And — again based on past performance, including Schiff's on multiple occasions — we will have no immediate way of knowing the accuracy of those leaks, although there's a safe bet they will range from misleading spin to outright lies.

So why not? Let's have transparency. (I know. I know. National security and all that. But I suspect whatever NatSec issues that would crop up have long since been washed down the email drain. It's more likely people are hiding behind phony ones.)

Nevertheless, if we're going to have transparency, let's have real transparency, from both sides. It would be in the interest of what Barack Obama frequently referred to as "fairness."

A significant percentage, evidently growing, of the population believes that the Russia probe itself was, putting it mildly, a cold-blooded political dirty trick to prevent the election of Donald Trump and, after that occurred and despite those efforts, seriously to undermine his presidency. If this is true, and the accusations that the meretricious Steele dossier — fed by the Russians and paid for by the Clinton campaign — was the primary instrument used by the DOJ to induce the FISA court to authorize spying on Americans, then we have on our hands the most despicable attack on the democratic process in our nation's history. The roots, the impetus for this subversion, some think, go astonishingly high.

Either way, this has to be cleared up. But how? I have a suggestion that is imperfect, as I will note, but a way to start.

The Mueller report and the inspector general's (Michael Horowitz) next report, the one that is supposed to deal with these disputed FISA decisions and related accusations of FBI/DOJ bias and their roots, should be published simultaneously, neither one redacted. That way we, the people who pay for both, can see if Mueller's investigation was worth our time and money or whether it was indeed the "fruit of a poisonous tree," as David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley wrote in the Wall Street Journal last June.

Similarly, we will be able to see if the inspector general is pulling his weight, fully investigating what transpired no matter where it leads, or whether he might be involved in a sophisticated coverup of his own — the Deep State's deepest cover.

In order to have a semblance of "fairness" and resolve these contentious issues even to a small degree, these two reports must be given equal weight and be published at as close to the same moment as possible.

Now, the problem: In truth, as many readers are undoubtedly thinking, this parity of release is unlikely to happen and, even if it did, the MSM would do its best to downplay, if not ignore, the IG's report. His report would also most likely be tardy — Horowitz was slow with the Clinton report — making it easier to dismiss as an afterthought and even easier for the MSM to employ their usual de facto censorship of ideas (and facts) they find inhospitable.

Moreover, Horowitz's Clinton report — despite exposing numerous malefactions on the part of the DOJ — bowdlerized its conclusion, possibly under the influence of Rod Rosenstein, allowing many of those same malefactors to escape punishment and in some cases even criticism, at least so far.

Rosenstein, however, will soon be gone. (Not surprisingly, he now questions the idea of government transparency. Not a lot of trust in us from old Rod for some reason.) Now William Barr will be running the show. It's not clear to what degree it is within the new AG's control to coordinate the release of these two reports, but in the public interest, he should try as much as possible to do so. Not only is one without the other insufficient, it takes us one step closer to being a Banana Republic. Perhaps we already are.

It's up to you, Mr. Barr. Save us. As you know, America is owed the whole truth and nothing but.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/mueller-and-the-inspector-general-reports-should-be-released-simultaneously/

THE FUTURE OF A COLLUSION

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
I found Michael Cohen’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee troubling and laughable and distasteful. With respect to his turn against Trump, though, what an oleaginous liar. Unfortunately, the Democrats have much more of this coming down the pike. This was only a preview of coming attractions. They seem to be moving on from collusion to the Trump Organization and so on. Can’t we all just get along?

In one important respect Cohen’s testimony was helpful to President Trump. Unless you were watching, however, you probably missed it. I refer to Cohen’s denial that he had been to Prague during the campaign, a key component of the so-called Steele Dossier. Cohen supposedly went to Prague to work out the details of the Trump campaign’s collusion with the friends of Vladimir Putin.

I gave Greg Gordon and Peter Stone of McClatchy News my award for the fakiest news of 2018 in recognition of their story on Cleta Mitchell. I think that Gordon and Stone deserved extra credit for “Sources: Mueller has evidence Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier” (April 13, 2018) and “Cell signal puts Cohen outside Prague around time of purported Russian meeting” (December 27, 2018). I doubt it, but we shall see.

Tucker Carlson was watching Cohen’s testimony. The April McClatchy story about his trip to Prague made a cameo appearance in his entertaining monologue last night (video below at about 02:10, transcript here). As Tucker reminds us, the dossier and related news stories were good enough for John Brennan. Brennan serves to remind us that this all started with an Obama administration counterintelligence investigation and alleged collusion with Russian authorities on the part of the Trump campaign.

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TAX THE RICH, FEED THE POOR. . .

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, DEMOCRATS, ECONOMY, ELIZABETH WARREN, EQUALITY, INCOME INEQUALITY, SOCIALISM, TAXES

There are days when I note that I was way ahead of the Progressive curve. For example, six years ago I mused here twice about why liberals should advocate for a wealth tax ( here and here), noting in the first post:

An excise tax of 1 percent on Buffett’s assets would yield something like $350 million a year.  Throw in Gates, the founders of Google, Apple, and Facebook, and the Hollywood moguls, and we’re looking at billions a year.  And why not?  They can afford it.  Oh wait, you’re right.  If liberals actually proposed an honest-to-God wealth tax, a lot of those rich Silicon Valley and Hollywood liberals would become Republicans in a big hurry.  But this also shows you what craven wusses liberals are today.

And the sequel:

I know, I know, it’s a bad idea on the merits, and would amount to double (or really quintuple) taxation on the assets of people who accumulated wealth the old fashioned way—by saving their after-tax earnings.  My purpose was to taunt the left, which—so far—has not embraced the idea.  So far.  But this may well change soon, and it could provide an opportunity for a wider argument about “fairness” that conservatives manage to flub consistently.

That “so far” is looking prescient, since today we have leading Democratic presidential candidates proposing exactly this.

The practical problems of a wealth tax are immense, including the administrative headache of valuation, and the ill effects it would have on non-liquid assets. But even in the case of Jeff Bezos, whose worth is largely tied up in a highly liquid publicly-traded stock, there remains a practical problem: can the market value of $3 billion of his stock (which is about what Warren’s proposed wealth tax would demand) actually be liquidated into cash that can be sent to the IRS? Someone would have to buy that much stock from Bezos—every year. Are there sufficient buyers out there? What would be the effect on the stock market value of companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc if these large annual liquidations are necessary? (My guess is that the whole scheme would collapse price/earnings ratios in ways that would have significant spillover effects that would not be good.) How will it affect credit markets if lots of people with ill-liquid assets like real estate and privately-owned companies have to borrow to make their wealth tax payments every year, and how will this in turn affect retained-earnings reinvestment by privately-held businesses?

There is one possible precedent to check on this. Way back in 1966, a Federal court ruled on antitrust grounds that Howard Hughes had to divest himself of his majority take in TWA, which at the time amounted to about $546 million. It was not easy to find buyers for that large an equity stake all at once, and I believe the court allowed Hughes a long time period to complete his divestment. Will the IRS have similar forbearance in the administration of an annual wealth tax?

Meanwhile, who would have thought that one of the best critiques of the wealth tax would come today from . . . NPR?

If a Wealth Tax is Such a Good Idea, Why Did Europe Kill Theirs?

In late January, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’s in the race to become president in 2020, added a new kind of tax to the American conversation, causing anxious pacing on superyachts in every port: a wealth tax. . .

Normally progressives like to point to Europe for policy success. Not this time. The experiment with the wealth tax in Europe was a failure in many countries. France’s wealth tax contributed to the exodus of an estimated 42,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2012, among other problems. Only last year, French president Emmanuel Macron killed it.

In 1990, twelve countries in Europe had a wealth tax. Today, there are only three: Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. According to reports by the OECDand others, there were some clear themes with the policy: it was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn’t raise much revenue. . .

[H]aving no exemptions means the U.S. government will have to get very good at valuing art, diamonds, superyachts, and all the other fabulous things the super rich collect. Indeed, Warren’s plan includes a call for “a significant increase in the IRS enforcement budget.” It was the hefty cost of enforcement that played a big part in Austria killing their wealth tax back in 1993. It turns out it costs a lot to track and value rich people’s stuff every year.

Worth reading the whole thing.

But what NPR and many others don’t realize is that wealth tax it not really about raising revenue. It is about punishing the rich. I keep coming back to the old 60s-era lyric of Ten Years After: “Tax the rich/feed the poor/till there are/no rich no more.” That pretty much gives it away, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t it be “Tax the rich/feed the poor/till there are/no poor no more“? Apparently not.

Meanwhile, stay tuned. I’ll do reparations for slavery next, because once again I was way ahead of the curve here too.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/02/tax-the-rich-feed-the-poor.php