The editors of the New York Times come out in opposition to eliminating the cap on state and local taxes (SALT) that was introduced in President Trump’s tax reform in 2017:

The top 20 percent of American households, ranked by income, would receive 96 percent of the benefits of the change, according to a detailed analysis by the widely respected Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The primary beneficiaries would be an even smaller group of the very wealthiest Americans. The 1 percent of households with the highest incomes would receive 54 percent of the benefit, on average paying about $36,000 less per year in federal income taxes.

A tax cut with such a skewed distribution of benefits ought to be unacceptable to any politician genuinely concerned about the rise of economic inequality.

concluding:

Most members of this editorial board are paying more in federal taxes because of the SALT deduction cap. In a narrow financial sense, we would benefit from its repeal. But we believe in the broader benefits of progressive taxation, and in the necessity of concrete steps toward creating a more equal society. Members of Congress who have espoused those principles repeatedly now have an important opportunity to demonstrate their sincerity.

Opponents of the cap on state and local taxes point out that it was intended as an attack vehicle on high tax states like New York and California (and Illinois). Its intention is irrelevant to whether it is good or bad policy. I think that all deductions should be capped, frequently at much lower levels than such caps as presently exist. For example, limiting the deductibility of home mortgage interest to $1 million is rather obviously not primarily going to benefit the poor or people with middle incomes. Additionally, it’s a backdoor subsidy to realtors and real estate developers.

Marginal rates are a sideshow in the debate on taxation. The real action is in how income is calculated. Our present system of taxation at the federal level is slightly progressive. That is true because of the limit on the income on which the payroll tax is levied and the various things that are deductible from income for tax purposes. The former should be raised and the latter lowered. That would make our system much fairer than it is at present and IMO is vastly preferable to adding additional brackets and deductions.

That was undoubtedly the highlight of last night’s Academy Awards show—Tyler Perry’s acceptance speech for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Now, it’s official. The U. S. government has openly acknowledged the Armenian genocide that took place during and following World War I. In an opinion piece at Politico veteran diplomat Daniel Fried provides a pretty good backgrounder:

Why the long delay? Why did the U.S., champion of human rights, resist use of “the g-word” for so long? When I worked on this issue, my colleagues and I knew the facts of the killings. We did not deny that they were genocide. But we did not use genocide to describe them. We used terms like atrocities, mass killings, slaughter, and mass murder. Strong terms all, but not genocide.

There were two reasons why the U.S. took that position. One, long championed in the U.S. government, had to do with relations with Turkey, a staunch NATO ally during the Cold War and after. Turkey regarded any U.S. use of the word genocide as a redline in relations and made clear that using the term would trigger a harsh reaction. Given U.S. interests in relations with Turkey, particularly military and security relations, such Turkish warnings carried weight. Besides, the U.S. had for decades maintained its close alliance with Turkey despite that country’s authoritarian bent, including a pattern of military rule. The U.S. didn’t much like that but had learned to live with it. In that context, putting the bilateral relationship under stress for the sake of recognizing the Armenian Genocide, something some in the U.S. government regarded as a historical dispute, was simply not seen as worth it.

That sort of “realist school” calculation was common in U.S. government thinking for decades. Support for the Greek Colonels regime after 1967, for the authoritarian Shah of Iran, and for Chile’s military rule after 1973, followed that pattern of swallowing hard yet remaining allied with authoritarian countries. Trying to brush away the Armenian Genocide as an irritating distraction that could disrupt otherwise close U.S.-Turkish relations fit that model. It was the norm for U.S.-Turkey policy for many years. These sorts of calculations made a kind of sense at the time. But they often do not look good in retrospect. Hypocrisy has a price.

I and my colleagues in the Bush administration had another, hopefully better, reason for avoiding use of the term Armenian Genocide: we wanted to encourage Turkey to come out of its shell of historical denial and hostility to Armenia; to find its own way to reconcile with Armenia and its own past.

There’s one observation I’d like to make which is how sanitized that account is. From 1916 to 1920 the ethnic Turks exterminated 90% of the Armenians within Turkey’s borders. And it wasn’t just the Ottoman. Much as the extermination of German Jews was part of Hitler’s German nationalist program, the Armenian genocide was part of the nationalist program of the “Young Turks” who ultimately morphed into the Kemalist government that ran Turkey for more than 80 years. Just as China’s present pogrom against its Uyghur population is part of China’s nationalist program.

IMO any hopes that Turkey would “come out of its shell of historical denial” is and always has been a fantasy.

Perhaps the most important aspect of President Biden’s announcement is that it confirms that he’s a not a foreign policy realist if anyone had any doubts. This should raise concerns. Wilsonian idealists have been getting us into trouble for decades. Realists have been no better. Jeffersonian idealists like me believe that cozying up too closely to dictators and religionist governments is corrupting.

And here’s another article about which I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, this time from Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam at the Washington Post. Their op-ed is about something I’ve been pointing out for decades:

The most formidable political class in the United States now is not the oligarchic 1 percent. It is not the struggling middle class. It is not the suffering poor. It is the upper middle class, strong in number, loud of opinion and fiercely determined to protect its interests.

It’s the upper middle class that candidate Joe Biden was attempting to appease when he promised not to raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 a year. Upper-middle-class Americans — those with household income in the top 20 percent — may not have incomes reaching quite those heights, but they are comfortably into the six figures. They also have solid retirement accounts, kids for whom four-year college is a given, good health care and valuable homes in good neighborhoods.

But they don’t come by all these things solely through their own hard work and brilliance (though they really do like to think that). Every step of the way, the government is there to help. Their affluence — perhaps your affluence — is plumped up with generous tax breaks and restrictive zoning laws. This is welfare for the prosperous.

Remember how Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it”? He made good on that promise in his 1996 legislation, which famously provided the poor with a “hand up, not a handout.” But that philosophy died in Congress this year, with the introduction, as part of the pandemic stimulus, of unconditional cash transfer to families with children — which Democrats want to make permanent.

Good: Giving handouts to those most in need is both economically rational and morally right. But giving handouts to the affluent is economically wasteful and morally repugnant.

Their candidates for “upper middle class welfare” include the deduction for state and local taxes, the home mortgage deduction, and 529 educational savings accounts. 80% of the benefit of those go to the top 20% of income earners. They also touch on restrictive zoning.

I notice that they don’t touch on the sources of income for a lot of the top 20% of income earners which as it turns out, is the government. Here in Chicago, for example, teachers, police officers, and firefighters are all in the top 20% of income earners.

I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at David Sirota and Andrew Perez’s piece in Jacobin, complaining that Democrats’ arguments about taxation sound a lot like Republicans’:

For years, Democratic lawmakers fought the GOP lie that cast estate tax cuts for billionaires as efforts to rescue family farms. But in this new era of ubiquitous misinformation, the same Democrats are waving a white flag in the battle against anti-tax bullshit. They are ripping a page out of the GOP’s “death tax” playbook and conjuring a new lie, this one depicting tax breaks for affluent donors as a defense of working-class homeowners.

They then lurch uncontrollably onto a reality which, if they did not realize it before, is tragic and, if they did realize it before, is comic:

In the process, Democratic leaders show they fight far harder for the donor class than they do for the working class.

Yep. Democratic politicians and, particularly, the Democratic leadership are focused, as Bill Clinton used to say, like a laser on their donors and those donors, unsusprisingly, aren’t the poor, the downtrodden, or minorities. The rest of the article continues on in this vein.

But who are these donors? If you look at the largest organizational donors listed by Open Secrets, you can discern a sort of pattern. After several organizations controlled by big money individuals (Bloomberg, Soros—Fund for Policy Reform, Dustin Moskovits—Asana, and Tom Steyer—Fahr LLC), they are public employees’ unions (SEIU, American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, etc.) and trade unions (Carpenters & Joiners Union, Laborers Union, Operating Engineers Union, etc.). Keep that in mind as you consider the policy proposals being advanced by the Biden Administration.

BTW only 14 U. S. representatives and senators receive 50% or more of their political contributions from small donors—8 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Most of those are fringe politicians—”democratic socialists” or ultra-conservatives. And the total amounts they’ve raised are pittances compared to some of the pols raising really big money.

Here’s a rather cynical assessment of the 20 years American adventure in Afghanistan by Sumantra Maitra at The National Interest:

The American imperial project in Afghanistan was a bunch of NGOs, and contractors in the defense department making money, and average men and women losing lives for nothing. A random bloke from South Carolina wouldn’t have gone to Kandahar, to start a shop, get married and settle down for the next century at least . . . thereby making the project doomed from the start. There is no dedicated civil service and the higher-education system currently in the United States that is comparable to what the utterly disciplined Victorian public schooling produced during the height of the British empire, which drove proud generations of Britains to ensure that the empire remained a martial but overall liberalizing force, to have the requisite brains trust under the purest form of meritocracy, something, incidentally, that China is doing now promoting its Belt-and-Road project and debt-trap diplomacy. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians working from Central Asia to Africa, starting businesses, and managing constructions, although they have not gone taken the exact same path as imperial Britain—at least not yet.

An empire needs two things, material prosperity, and ideological zeal. The average American lacked both in the last twenty years.

That’s not far from how I see it and it’s not limited to our “imperial project” in Afghanistan. It’s true of everything in government from federal right down to local. To not recognize that is to not understand how our government actually functions.

We are in dire need of reform but there are too many people whose livelihoods are completely dependent on government for it to take place.

I recommend that you read John McWhorter’s most recent post. Here’s its opening:

The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.

Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.

Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.

First, watch this, the 1776Unites video. Just a few minutes.

And now, as to what we are referring to, it starts actually before last summer. I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.

These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.

Read the whole thing. And the video is short and to the point.

Confucius said that if your plan is a one year plan, plant rice. If your plan is a ten year plan, plant trees. If your plan is a 100 year plan, teach children. Some children are being taught today that that are incapable of learning. That harm will be with us for decades. It should never have started let alone be admired or allowed to continue.

The countries with which we will compete in the years to come aren’t being burdened with such pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-caring claptrap. It needs to be rejected in no uncertain terms.

I didn’t realize that David Ignatius had Armenian ancestry (on his father’s side). That’s one of the things that comes out in his most recent Washington Post column. Today there are about 11 million Armenians worldwide, mostly in Turkey, Armenia, Iran, Russia, and the United States. If you’re not familiar with the term “Armenian genocide” it refers to the mass slaughter of Turkey’s Armenian population by the Turks a century ago. Turkey’s position is that the numbers have been greatly exaggerated and they were merely putting down an insurrection. Officially, the U. S. hasn’t contradicted the official Turkish account.

In the column Mr. Ignatius considers President Biden’s official recognition of the Armenian genocide favorably:

Armenians around the world surely will rejoice in Biden’s planned announcement. They will celebrate the affirmation of justice and truth after so many decades of Turkish denial of the horrific events of 1915. But I hope they will also think, as Gregorian would have, about how to build bridges now to help Turkey escape from the horrors of its history.

Saturday ought to be a day when Turks, too, are liberated from the past. Denial of the genocide has wounded Armenians, but it has also damaged Turkey. Historians have long affirmed the truth of what happened, including Turkish scholar Taner Akcam in his detailed study of Ottoman sources, titled “A Shameful Act.”

Denial of these facts has been a dead weight around Turkey’s neck, as if dragging the past into the future. Turkey’s continuing anger has been manifest, too, in its support for Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

I think that Mr. Biden’s decision to recognize the Armenian genocide is the right one but I also think the President Trump’s decision to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem was a good one. I think we should deal with the world as it is rather than as other countries (or peoples) wish it were in their creation myths. We shouldn’t lose track of the facts but that recognition may make dealing with the Turks more difficult.

As I have said before the Turks are not our friends. Kemalist Turkey was a useful ally during the Cold War but Islamist Turkey is an ally in name only. I’m not concerned about their allying with Russia or Iran; their own interests are not well-aligned with those of Russia or Iran and, indeed, in the case of Iran are in some ways antithetical to them. We need to understand Turkey as it is rather than as we wish it were and that includes the Armenian genocide and Turkey’s denial of it.

I don’t remember who said it but it remains true. History is a vendetta.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Joseph Sternberg suggests that Democrats are trying to increase inflation as a political and economic strategy:

Reduced inflation-adjusted labor costs are one way to maintain some modicum of U.S. competitiveness while the Biden administration saddles the economy with productivity-killing higher taxes and stiffer regulations. It’s time to stop talking about inflation (transitory or otherwise) as a side effect of the government’s various economic wishes and commands. Inflation is the ingredient Democrats hope prevents this policy soufflé from collapsing.

I don’t believe it’s a deliberate strategy. I think they’ve been persuaded that inflation is completely controllable and that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

The balance of his column is mostly dedicated to an explanation of why “transitory inflation” is a misconception:

What ordinary people know and economists too often forget is that while inflationary spikes may come and go, higher prices are forever. This spring’s inflation surge will lead to a permanently higher baseline. A lower inflation rate in the future will only moderate future increases from that new, higher base. The one thing that almost certainly will not happen is that prices will fall substantially to undo some of this allegedly “transitory” inflation. The Federal Reserve will fight tooth and nail to prevent that.

and, as Mr. Sternberg notes, there have been winners and losers in the increases in wages with fewer and fewer winners and many, many more losers. While it’s possible that the Democrats have been persuaded by their technocratic constituents, who are among those who have largely kept up with inflation, that it’s benign others of their constituents have not been so fortunate. IMO that’s an explanation for ever more blacks and Hispanics voting Republican: they feel abandoned and ignored by Democrats.