Too scattershot behind the scenes. The post The Rush album Geddy Lee thought was overdone: “I realised we had over-cooked it” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

It’s difficult to debate policy in the midst of a political race given that partisans on both sides have already made up their minds and aren’t seriously calling balls and strikes on each candidate’s specific proposals. Yet American voters are in a good position to debate one particularly important policy issue — namely, the matter of tariffs. Both candidates are dead wrong on the topic, so a discussion about it won’t advance either side’s election prospects. Maybe we can take a look without prompting the usual knee-jerk partisan reactions. Tariffs are taxes countries impose on imported goods. They impose them to protect domestic industries from competition, raise revenues, or punish other countries for bad behavior. During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump vowed to boost tariffs — perhaps to as much as 20 percent. He expanded tariffs as president, but Joe Biden kept most of them in place and increased other ones. Kamala Harris criticized Trump for them, but this is largely a bipartisan fiasco. Back when Republicans more consistently championed free markets rather than nebulous economic “populism,” they understood that, despite claims that tariffs are imposed only on foreigners, they are just a fancy term for a tax that is mostly paid by domestic consumers. A report from the Tax Foundation’s Erica York accurately concludes that “tariffs benefit some but hurt far more others” and that “tariff-protected industries also rarely (if ever) become stronger.” The Trump administration championed its steel tariffs that were designed to protect union steelworker jobs, but those tariffs also increased costs for steel-using industries (such as automobiles). The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) points to a University of California–Davis study finding that Trump’s “tariffs on steel and aluminum had likely resulted in seventy-five thousand fewer manufacturing jobs in steel-using industries while creating just one thousand jobs in steel production.” That’s a foolish tradeoff. York’s second conclusion is important, too. By protecting companies from vibrant competition, tariffs can cause them to become complacent, subservient to union demands, and mired in inefficiencies. One oft-cited example is Ronald Reagan’s tariffs (even the Gipper made mistakes) to protect Harley-Davidson from Japanese competitors. Some blame that decision for Harley’s failure to adjust to changing motorcycle tastes and for a subsequent sales slide. Tariffs also exacerbate international tensions, sometimes resulting in actual wars or hostilities. They also invite retaliatory tariffs that harm U.S. companies that are dependent on exports. They overall reduce economic activity and gross domestic product and can actually encourage illegal immigration. If, say, the United States imposes tariffs on Mexican goods, that reduces Mexican manufacturing and leads to unemployment and international migration. Tariffs also drive up federal spending. This is from CFR again: “The most common way for countries to fight back against tariffs — aside from levying retaliatory tariffs — is to subsidize the domestic industries that have been hit. The Trump administration countered tariffs on agricultural products by providing farmers with tens of billions of dollars in aid to make up for lost exports.” Neither party much cares about spending these days, but federal debt remains a looming problem. Still, the main rub against tariffs again is that they are taxes, which drive inflation and harm consumers. Efforts to hide that fact might actually get a little harder under a recent bipartisan Senate bill called the Fighting for America Act. The legislation is union-backed nonsense that would, per Politico, “reform the de minimis trade provision that has fueled a flood of low-value imports from Chinese fast-fashion giants and other suppliers.” It eliminates a so-called loophole that allows low-cost shipments (below $800) to enter our country without paying duties. The House version of the bill imposes a $2 entry fee on each shipped item, which will be included as a line item on myriad small shipments that customers receive from overseas. Usually, the costs of tariffs are assessed upstream on commercial shipments and therefore hidden from consumers, but if this bill becomes law, then at least people will see the cost on their bill. It will offer definitive proof that tariffs are not paid by shadowy foreigners, but by American consumers. Perhaps Americans shouldn’t need this simple lesson, but given the current state of the political parties and the presidential race, it’s unlikely they’ll hear it during a stump speech or debate. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Watch Out for Rent-Control Madness Government Won’t Save Local Newsrooms The post Time for a Teachable Moment on Tariffs appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I watched the debate, and … oh boy. Pay no attention to whether Donald Trump lost his cool — he did, Kamala Harris sounded annoying — she did, or The moderators shamelessly took sides — did they ever. None of that matters because the clouds parted, the sun broke through, and Kamala informed us that, for the first time in her campaign, she has a plan. Her campaign isn’t just about saving democracy anymore. She’s going to save the economy too — by creating an “opportunity economy.” Apparently “opportunity” came in second to “joy” in the focus group testing. She even told us how she’s going to create that “opportunity economy.” She’s going to give away stuff. Who would have thought a Democrat had such a capacity for out-of-the-box creativity. She’s going to give new parents $6,000 so they can afford a new crib — which, given the current rate of inflation, sounds about right. She’s going to give new homeowners $25,000 to offset the skyrocketing mortgage rates she created — for a couple of years anyway. She’s going to give new business startups $50,000 to replace some of the mom-and-pop venture capital lost when she and Joe shuttered their businesses for a virus. That’s it. That’s her plan: spend, spend, spend — sorry, give, give, give.  There’s just one teeny-tiny little thing that Kamala didn’t get to with all of her planning — the other side of the equation. Money out must equal money in. She didn’t explain where she’s going to get the money for all of her generous giving. Had the moderators thought to ask how she’s going to pay for it, I’m sure Kamala would have screeched “It’s an investment!” When Kamala says government spending is an investment, she’s claiming it will pay for itself by stimulating the economy and creating more taxpayers — like baby crib manufacturers. She claims that government “investment” raises revenue just like the Inflation Reduction Act did. Oops … I wonder if the moderators would have fact-checked that? The cold hard reality is that the government doesn’t create wealth. It can only consume it, waste it, or redistribute it — sometimes all at once. When Kamala says she’s going to make an investment, she’s promising to take our money, wash it through a few agencies who charge processing fees, give a fraction of it back, and then insist that we now have more money to spend. For Kamala to give-give-give, she must first take-take-take. There are only three ways for Kamala to get her “investment” seed money. She can cut government, raise taxes, or borrow it. Had Kamala promised to cut government heads, regulations, or subsidies, she might have actually had a plan to stimulate the economy. But have you ever heard the words “cut government” cross Kamala’s lips? Me neither. She has no intention of  Laying off any of her 80,000 new IRS agents, Slashing her new regulations on home appliances, or Stopping subsidies for the wind turbines polluting Nantucket beaches. If some maverick journalist ever asks about tax increases, Kamala will soothe everyone’s fears by saying we’re only going to “make the wealthy pay their fair share.” That will only cost her 741 votes (the number of billionaires in the United States). But planning to loot the fortunes of the wealthy completely misses the scope of our spending problem. Our federal government is currently racking up debt at a rate of $1 trillion every 100 days. If the federal government were to seize every dime of every billionaire’s wealth, it would balance the budget for a mere 17 months — and that’s before Kamala starts her $1.7 trillion “giving” frenzy. The fact is, the wealthy don’t have enough loot to pick up Kamala’s tab. If she want’s to cover her “investment” with taxes, she’ll have to take it from all of us.  Fun fact: To balance our current federal budget, every man, woman, and child in America would need to pony up an additional $1,000 per month — every month, forever. Kamala won’t cut government, and taxpayers can’t afford her plans, so Kamala’s last option to come up with the money is to borrow it — driving up our already astronomical debt. Did I mention that our current debt is enough $100 bills to reach to the moon and back 72 times? But as every mortgage holder knows, debt isn’t free. Not only does it drive up inflation, but we must pay the interest on that debt. The current interest on our debt stands at a whopping $5,000 per person per year. That’s money that will be taken from us, our children, and our grandchildren, into perpetuity — and Kamala promises to add to it. So, Kamala can pay for her “opportunity economy” by taking the money from  Her army of bureaucrats — which she won’t do, Taking it from us directly as taxes — which we can’t afford, Or taking it from our children — who don’t have a say in the matter. A government promise to give is also a promise to take. Walter Mondale made a campaign promise to raise taxes during his 1984 presidential bid. He learned the hard way that “I’m going to take your money” isn’t a winning strategy. He lost to Ronald Reagan in a 49-state-to-1 landslide. So instead, Kamala promises to give, and leaves out the “some of your own money back” small print. READ MORE: The Debate Was Fixed Trump Debates Harris, Muir, and Davis to Stalemate The post Kamala Harris Has a Plan — To Take, Take, Take appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I feel somewhat obligated to comment on the cat thing. I grew up about 30 minutes from Springfield, Ohio — in fact, I still live within an hour of the place — and, as far back as I can remember, it wasn’t a “good part of town.” In high school, I was frequently my younger siblings’ chauffeur (not something I complain about, we listened to plenty of John Denver and memorized the whole The Greatest Showman soundtrack at the top of our lungs). I did the drive to Springfield once a week for nearly a year, shuttling the violinists in our family to orchestra practice. We kept the car doors locked and were convinced that an old, abandoned, Victorian house on a hill in our path was likely haunted.  More to the point, Springfield in the mid-2010s wasn’t an up-and-coming place. Nobody in Ohio was “going” to Springfield, and a good many people were trying to get out. That’s not to say there aren’t nice areas of Springfield (downtown is small, but cute if you ignore the abandoned industrial buildings), but it is the picture of the post-industrial Midwest — a once booming town brought to its knees by high taxes, bad government, and worse management. And then there was the crime. What I didn’t know in high school was that I-70 is a major artery of drug and sex trafficking. Springfield, Englewood, and Huber Heights, etc. — all run-down small towns that are near the intersection between I-70 and I-75 — are major hotbeds of serious crime, and they have been for years. Why do I tell this story? Well, all of this was before the Biden administration decided to put Haitians on airplanes and fly them to Springfield.  And it was long before JD Vance and Donald Trump decided to turn reports that Haitian immigrants are eating Ohioan cats and ducks into possibly the most effective meme campaign in presidential campaign history. When people talk about this story on X, you get the sense that they think Springfield was a cute, prosperous, small town in America and that the Biden administration is ruining it. The real story is much more tragic in that the Biden administration is just the latest in a long train of federal and local governments that have failed Springfield. At the moment, I can guarantee that enterprising journalists are descending on Springfield. Correspondents from ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and more are likely booking hotel rooms at the Hilton on I-70, eager to answer the all-important question: Do Haitians actually eat their neighbor’s cats? Are the ducks in the park ending up on dinner plates?  It’s quite possible that they’ll discover the answer to that specific question is no. Pets are safe (at least, according to police reports, YouTubers say otherwise). All the memes of Donald Trump saving cats and ducks are internet hyperbole. But if that’s where their investigation ends, they’ll have missed the point. The snapshot they’ll get of Ohio in the three days they’re on the job chasing down stories of missing cats is just that, a snapshot. This is a moment in time that has been decades in the making.  It’s not even really about the Haitian immigrants. Look, Haiti is a horrible place. I wouldn’t want to live there either, and I don’t blame anyone for getting on the first airplane to get out of there. They couldn’t help that the airplane they boarded landed them in Springfield, Ohio — which is a place Ohioans want to get out of as well. In the interest of writing this article accurately, I spent about 30 minutes this morning driving through neighborhoods and past abandoned warehouses in Springfield. It looks exactly how I remember it. I spotted two stray cats, neither of which appeared concerned for their lives (for any interested parties, they’re hanging around Broadway St.), but perhaps more importantly, I took note of the neighborhoods. Many of them are rickety, multi-colored, and peeling paint, but they’re all on roomy plots of land on streets lined with ancient trees once planted to make it a pleasant place to live. Once, perhaps 60 years ago, this was a place where the American Dream thrived: Buy a house, raise a family, have a pet, work a good job.  Now it’s a shell, and you can’t blame the cats or the Haitians.  The post It’s Not About the Cats. It’s About America. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump walked onto the debate stage in Philadelphia deeply aware that he should show undecided voters that he is focused on issues and not his list of grievances. But time was his enemy. Trump did a solid job of hitting Vice President Kamala Harris on the U.S. economy and the chaos at the Southwest border under President Joe Biden, as well as her 2019 support for a ban on fracking — the very policies she supported, the very policies that have turned many Americans against Biden. Trump also rightly noted that Harris had become the Democratic nominee even though “she got zero votes.” But as the clock ticked, Trump claimed that he won the 2020 election, even though he lost it. And it was an odd decision, given that Trump recently admitted on the Lex Fridman podcast that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker.” Trump refrained from calling Harris personal names. Even as she rattled off a host of areas where she argued Trump is weak — Ukraine, COVID, NATO — Trump did not lose his cool. Harris was not afraid to confront Trump. Not at all. At one point, she invited viewers to go to a Trump rally so they could watch attendees start to leave before Trump’s speech is over. In short order, Trump mentioned news reports, which had been debunked, about illegal migrants killing Ohio residents’ pets. Harris had to contend with a delicate balancing act herself — distancing herself from an unpopular incumbent who picked her as his running mate — without appearing disloyal. “Clearly I am not Joe Biden,” Harris said at one point. Trump, of course, sought to tie her with the president and his policy failures. “Why hasn’t she done it?” Trump asked rhetorically about Harris’ newly found zeal — after three and a half years of dormancy — for enforcing immigration law. The veep’s most important goal, of course, was to convince undecided voters that she is a moderate, not a San Francisco progressive. In that regard, Harris got a lot of help from David Muir and Linsey Davis, the ABC News moderators, who did not press her particularly hard about her changing record on immigration enforcement, fracking, and Medicare for All. When she bashed Trump’s record on COVID, she didn’t have to disclose what she would have done differently. Harris didn’t talk much about her own policy positions. So, who won? On style and points, I’d say Harris. But I don’t think Americans are looking for the best debater. They’re hungry for policies that will create jobs and economic stability. They don’t want Bidenomics. They want the economy they had under Donald Trump. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: The Debate Was Fixed Trump Debates Harris, Muir, and Davis to Stalemate The post ABC Moderators Go After Trump. Harris Remains Blurry. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

During his campaign, former President Donald Trump has proposed his share of bad policy ideas, such as a 20 percent tariff across the board. But tasking Elon Musk with heading a commission to make the government more efficient is one worth considering. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump said this commission will conduct “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” Efficiency is subjective. Some people believe that empowering the IRS with more powers to collect more taxes is efficient. Some believe that efficiency means putting an end to waste, fraud, and abuse. I have a more extensive definition. Yes, an efficient federal government would be free of fraud and abuse, but it also wouldn’t subsidize private-sector activities like exports, manufacturing, green energy, or any other sectors, for that matter. Nor would an efficient federal government subsidize state governments for activities that are not federal in nature. Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute reports that in 2019, $721 billion went from Washington, D.C., to the states for activities that states themselves should oversee, like transportation and education. That number exploded during the pandemic. As Edwards shows, such “grants-in-aid” programs produce irresponsible policymaking as they misallocate resources and undermine accountability and democratic control. Oh, and they also produce larger deficits. Trump’s definition of efficiency is narrower. He said: “As a first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. This will save trillions of dollars. Trillions.” Trillions? I doubt it. You can’t balance the budget on the back of fraud and improper payments alone. But ending this waste is the least that government officials should do. As such, a commission stepping in where our delinquent legislators are asleep on the job is welcomed. According to the Government Accountability Office’s latest report on the issue, “Federal agencies made an estimated $236 billion in improper payments in FY 2023, and cumulative federal improper payment estimates have totaled about $2.7 trillion since FY 2003.” The GAO also reports that five programs are responsible for 79 percent, or $186 billion, of these improper payments. My research on this topic suggests that only 5 percent of the improper payments are underpayments, and most of the overpaid money is never recovered. Medicare, Medicaid, and that darling of the Right and the Left, the earned income tax credit, are all systematically at the top of the improper-payment culprit list every year. Yet nothing happens except that the improper payments grow. It’s another sign that government officials, Republican or Democrat — probably including your own House and Senate representatives, dear readers — have very little respect for our hard-earned dollars. We shouldn’t tolerate such abuse. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of billions of dollars are for payments that, while neither fraudulent nor improper, fund activities that are redundant, do not achieve what they set out to, or even backfire. Nevertheless, an efficiency commission is not without challenges. Political resistance is the first. Programs that shouldn’t exist have strong political backing, either because they serve a particular constituency or because they benefit powerful interest groups. For instance, agricultural subsidies — often and correctly criticized as wasteful — persist due to strong lobbying from farming interests. Political realities make meaningful cuts or reforms difficult. Dominic Pino at National Review reminds us that the Grace Commission under President Ronald Reagan made 2,478 recommendations to save $424 billion over three years (in 1984 dollars). Most of the executive branch recommendations were implemented, but those that required legislative action weren’t, likely for the reasons laid out above. Pino writes that “the recommendations that were implemented from the commission have saved the federal government a total of $1.9 trillion between the publication of the report and 2020.” The Grace Commission was a raging success compared to former Vice President Al Gore’s attempt to cut waste as part of former President Bill Clinton’s plan to “reinvent government.” As the Wall Street Journal reports, “the Clinton Administration abandoned the effort amid union opposition and Mr. Gore’s desire to appeal to his party’s left as he sought the presidential nomination in 2000.” Cutting government spending is hard work. So is sending people into space. Musk does the latter better than NASA, so he might be up for tackling the former. The only question is whether that’s the best use of his time, considering that Congress will continue to be an obstacle to efficiency. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Welcome Elon Musk’s Efficiency Commission (Just Don’t Expect Congress To) appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from The David Knight Show:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Alan Barton, All News Pipeline: Mid September may be a bit early to speak of the 2024 US Presidential election results (after all, the elections per say are not even held until November 5th) but there is nevertheless much we can determine this early.  First and foremost is that there will be massive voter […]