Because tonight in 1982, this happened.
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Democratic leaders say they plan to run this November on the promise of repealing parts President Trump’s tax cuts if elected. Should someone tell them that they’ve already lost this debate?
“It may have to be a ‘replace and repeal’ — replace them and repeal the bill,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, according to The Hill. She’s urging members to hold “teach-ins” in their districts to explain “what this tax scam means to families.”
Of course, Democrats — not one of whom voted for the tax cuts — aren’t providing any specifics about what parts of the new tax law they would actually repeal, or what they’d replace it with. And for good reason, since the individual parts of the GOP “tax scam” are hugely popular.
Here’s a handy checklist of the key features, and the support they get from the public, according to the most recent Harvard-Harris poll.
Lower tax brackets for middle class families: 84% support.
Doubling of the child tax credit: 82%.
A near doubling of the standard deduction: 81%.
A 23% tax deduction for small business “pass-through” income: 77%.
A cap on mortgage interest deductions: 74%.
Lower the threshold — from 10% to 7.5% of income — to deduct medical expenses: 70% support.
Repeal of the ObamaCare mandate tax penalty: 63%.
A special 14.5% repatriation tax rate on earnings held overseas: 60%.
Elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax for businesses and an increase in the AMT threshold for individuals: 56%
A cap on state and local tax deductions: 52%.
Since Democrats aren’t going to volunteer information on which of these provisions they plan to repeal, we would encourage voters to demand specifics.
Perhaps Democrats will only push to repeal the lower corporate income tax rate of 21%, or to raise the top marginal rate back to 39.6%, in the name of sticking it to “the rich.”But even these provisions get 46% approval. And this number is likely to climb as the public has time to digest the seemingly endless stream of reports about bonuses, pay raises and massive new investments all sparked by the corporate tax cuts.
As we noted in this space earlier, not only are the specific provisions of the GOP tax bill overwhelmingly popular — when they are explained to people — the entire tax bill is gaining in popularity.
The New York Times saw a nine-point increase in approval between December and mid-January. A new Monmouth University poll found that approval went from 26% in December to 44% in January. In both polls, disapproval of the tax law is now below 50%.
Monmouth also found that the share of people who think their taxes will go up fell from 50% in December to 36% in January.
Trump’s State of the Union speech, in which he detailed the tax provisions and the benefits, will likely goose these approval numbers. A CNN snap poll after the speech found that 62% say the tax provisions Trump talked about “will move the country in the right direction.”
Plus, workers are starting to see bigger take-home pay, thanks to the new lower withholding rates, which will cause millions to discover that Democrats have been lying to them about the tax bill all along. Telling these workers that this money is “crumbs” will only make Democrats seem more disconnected from reality.
When you’re losing an argument, the best thing to do is stop arguing.
Moreover, by the November elections Americans will have had nine months of more take-home pay. But Democrats should feel free to go ahead and keep telling Americans they don’t deserve more of their own money; government does.
This is where I expect to get a comment from a Democrat about the federal debt, an issue Democrats ignored from 2009 to 2016.The debt, caused by deficits, will never be reduced except by cutting federal spending. I am perfectly willing to eliminate government jobs at every level, even if Democrats and Republicans are not.
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The number one single today in 1961 was based on the Italian song “Return to Sorrento”:
Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared on the BBC’s “Ready Steady Go!”
During the show, Billboard magazine presented an award for the Beatles’ having the top three singles of that week.
Today in 1968, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Richie Furay and Jim Messina were all arrested by Los Angeles police not for possession of …
… but for being at a place where marijuana use was suspected.
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National Public Radio has some surprising news for those who assume young people support gun control:
High school students across the United States have been leading the call for more gun control since the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
Some have called them the “voice of a generation on gun control” that may be able to turn the tide of a long-simmering debate.
But past polling suggests that people younger than 30 in the U.S. are no more liberal on gun control than their parents or grandparents — despite diverging from their elders on the legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage and other social issues.
“Sometimes people surprise us, and this is one of those instances that we don’t know why,” says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup.
Over the past three years, his polling organization asked the under-30 crowd whether gun laws in the U.S. should be made more strict, less strict or kept as they are now. On average, people between the ages of 18 and 29 were 1 percentage point more likely to say gun laws should be more strict than the overall national average of 57 percent.
“Young people statistically aren’t that much different than anybody else,” Newport says.
Polling by the Pew Research Center last year came to similar conclusions: 50 percent of millennials, between the ages of 18 and 36, said gun laws in the U.S. should be more strict. That share was almost identical among the general public, according to Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew.
Pew did find significant differences between millennials and older generations on two gun control proposals — banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. The results showed that a greater share of millennials — both Republicans and Democrats — are more conservative when it comes to those bans compared with Generation Xers, baby boomers and members of the silent generation.
“What we’re hearing now in the immediate aftermath of Parkland might not be representative of what a whole generation feels,” Parker says.
To be clear, many demographers argue that millennials make up one part of today’s generation of young people. Some say that millennials include people born in the 1980s and all the way through 2000.
The teenage high school activists who have been organizing since the Florida shooting, they say, are part of a separate group some call “Generation Z.” Pollsters generally don’t count the views of those under 18, so there probably won’t be national polling on this group until more of these young people are officially adults.
Still, for 19-year-old Abigail Kaye, who considers herself a millennial, these polling results about her peers come as a shock.
“I think that’s surprising because I feel like we’re a more progressive generation,” says Kaye, who attends the University of Delaware.
Kaye says she remembers hearing about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., when she was growing up about a couple hours away in Scituate, R.I.
“We’ve grown up more, I think, with this kind of gun violence, so you’d think maybe we’d push for more regulations,” she adds.
The poll findings also surprised some members of Students for the Second Amendment, a club at the University of Delaware.
The club’s treasurer, Jordan Riger of Lutherville, Md., 22, says that after taking an National Rifle Association course on pistol shooting when she was 18, she has seen firearms as tools for self-defense. But she thinks many of her millennial peers don’t.
“We are living in a time right now where we’re seeing a lot more of these mass casualties,” Riger says. “I think when people don’t know that much about firearms, when they see it on the news used in horrible fashion, that’s like all they associate it with.” …
Still, 22-year-old Jeremy Grunden of Harrington, Del., says he is encouraged to hear that millennials are less likely to support banning assault-style weapons.
“I base what we need off of what the military has,” says Grunden, who is president of Students for the Second Amendment at the University of Delaware. “When it comes to … the Second Amendment, we’re supposed to be a well-armed and well-maintained militia and all that. Quite frankly, we need that and plus more.”
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) gun rights group is based in Bellevue, Washington. Since the Florida shooting fallout has targeted 18 to 20 year olds, their membership has grown by 1,200 percent in that age range. It doesn’t bode well for gun bills that target ordinary young adults. And nobody pressured them into joining the SAF, they just did it because they realized their rights were being trampled.
A statement released by SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb read:
Since the tragic mass shooting at a Florida high school last month resulted in efforts to restrict firearms ownership by young adults, the Second Amendment Foundation has experienced a 1,200 percent increase in the number of 18- to 20-year-olds joining or supporting the organization, SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb reported today.
“We normally don’t get that many members or donors in that age group,” Gottlieb noted, “since the gun rights movement typically trends toward older Americans. But the 18- to 20-year-olds have never been specifically targeted before, and they are obviously alarmed. This influx of young Americans into the gun rights movement is important, not just to respond to the current gun control threat, but as the movement has gotten older, it is encouraging to see so many young adults getting involved in support of Second Amendment rights.
“SAF has always conducted leadership training conferences,” he continued, “but now we’ll increase our emphasis on a younger audience, to integrate them into leadership roles.”
Gottlieb became aware of the spike in younger memberships after three weeks of almost non-stop news and editorializing about preventing young adults from buying firearms, especially modern sporting rifles. The issue really intensified after legislation was signed in Florida to raise the age limit on firearms purchases, and at least two national chains imposed their own restrictions.
“It’s important to note,” Gottlieb said, “that this interest surge has been organic on the Internet. SAF did nothing special to make it happen. They have really done this on their own, finding us on the Internet and following up.
“I want young adults in the 18-to-20 age group to know they are welcome in the gun rights movement,” he stressed. “While the media has paraded high school students to push a gun control agenda, the age group that is now being targeted by that effort is energizing, and showing that there is another side to this controversy.”
As you have seen on our page, there have been numerous young people who are standing against the pressure to “perform” for the gun control crowd. They have endured ridicule, bullying, school sanctions, and extreme peer pressure, only to make them more energized. As the push to destroy the rights of 18-to 20 year olds gains steam, so is the pushback from not only that age group but even younger of high school age. If the anti-gunners continue their attempts, there will be severe consequences, guaranteed.
If you are not mature enough to own a rifle at 18, but you are old enough to carry one into battle…there is something extremely wrong with our nation’s leadership. Destroying the rights of young men and women who are legal adults is one of the most unconstitutional actions conceived.
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Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate in recent history to lose popularity after a defeat, and she seems determined to keep it that way. Speaking in India over the weekend, she blamed Donald Trump’s election on voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights . . . don’t like women, you know, getting jobs . . . don’t wanna, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.” She also claimed that “married white women” supported Mr. Trump in response to “pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son—whoever—believes you should.”
More interesting than this “basket of deplorables” redux, though, was Mrs. Clinton’s commentary on the role of economic concerns in the 2016 contest. “There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won,” she said. “But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.” To scattered applause, she continued: “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
This is an unexpected twist in the debate over Mr. Trump’s rise. Analysts on the center and right have tended to emphasize the economic factors that made Mr. Trump’s victory possible, noting that voters in regions with stagnating incomes and diminishing job opportunities are likelier to be drawn to populism. Many on the left, meanwhile, have argued that economic concerns are simply an excuse for bigotry. “Economic anxiety” is even a running joke on progressive Twitter —a sarcastic response to reports of racism among Republicans.
But now Mrs. Clinton herself has endorsed the “economic anxiety” thesis, albeit in a backhanded way. She sees her electoral disappointment in economically downscale regions not as a political failure but a source of validation—and, apparently, an indication of those voters’ failings. Similarly, last September she told Vox that the Electoral College is “an anachronism” in part because “I won in counties that produce two-thirds of the economic output in the United States.” Should those voters have more of a say?
Since Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party has usually been identified as the party of the “common man,” and its adversaries as defenders of wealth and economic privilege. Jackson earned that reputation for his party by reducing property qualifications for the franchise for white men. But the Democrats’ most recent standard-bearer sounds an awful lot like the 19th-century conservatives who thought political representation should be tied to wealth. This is a significant moment in America’s partisan realignment.
It would seem Hillary doesn’t think the Democrats need to do anything to reattract 2016’s Democratic-leaning Trump voters.
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Today in 1965, Britain’s Tailor and Cutter Magazine ran a column asking the Rolling Stones to start wearing ties. The magazine claimed that their male fans’ emulating the Stones’ refusal to wear ties was threatening financial ruin for tiemakers.
To that, Mick Jagger replied:
“The trouble with a tie is that it could dangle in the soup. It is also something extra to which a fan can hang when you are trying to get in and out of a theater.”
Jagger is a graduate of the London School of Economics. Smart guy.
Today in 1974, Jefferson Airplane …
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Today in 1965, the members of the Rolling Stones were fined £5 for urinating in a public place, specifically a gas station after a concert in Romford, England.
Today in 1967, Britain’s New Musical Express magazine announced that Steve Winwood, formerly of the Spencer Davis Group, was forming a group with the rock and roll stew of Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood and Dave Mason, to be called Traffic …
… which made rock fans glad.
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Kyle Smith of, of all places, National Review:
The list of movie stars who commanded the U.S. box office for five consecutive years is short: There’s Bing Crosby, and there’s Burt Reynolds. Along with Shirley Temple, herself Hollywood’s leading attraction for four straight years, Reynolds is one of the great movie stars of yesterday who seem most in danger of being completely erased from the cultural memory. Let’s not allow that to happen. May this week’s retrospective celebration of five of his films at New York City’s Metrograph cinema prompt a renewed appreciation of his good-humored vitality.
There is a reason for Reynolds’s precipitous fall, or rather about 40 of them: Rent a Cop and Cop and ½, Stroker Ace and Stick, Heat and City Heat,Cannonball Run II and, for that matter, The Cannonball Run. His mustache-first persona became a walking joke, a precursor to those man-parodies Ron Swanson and Ron Burgundy. Burt! The name itself, immediately summoning him and only him, became funny, at the other end of the naming scale from Eggbert, the hypermasculine end. In part because of Burt, macho and manly became words that could no longer be used, except jokingly. The sketch-comedy version of Reynolds was a swaggering dope, a sexist jerk, the guy whose chest hair clogged up the drain in the hot tub. He married Loni Anderson; he was Brawny Man come to life. The proud emblem of hairy virility on his upper lip became ridiculous, downgraded to the status of “pornstache.” After a while, its like became unwearable except ironically.
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Long-time readers of this blog, which will be seven years old at the end of this month (still looking for a Corvette as a birthday gift, by the way), should be familiar with the movie “The Tao of Steve” and its identification of the cool Steves: Austin …
… McGarrett …
… and McQueen:
(“The Tao of Steve” list inexplicably fails to include not only a lot of other Steves, but myself, Man of Action. Strange.)
At any rate, Space.com reports (not about Steve Austin):
New work helps to codify the cause and properties of “Steve,” an aurora-like phenomenon documented by citizen scientists as it streaked across the sky in western Canada.
As of a new paper’s release today (March 14), the phenomenon has been dubbed STEVE, a backronym that matches the name originally given by aurora watchers. (STEVE is short for “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.”) According to the new work, the distinctive ribbon of purple light with green accents — which can occur at lower latitudes than normal auroras do — gives scientists a glimpse into the interactions of Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere.
“It’s exciting because this might be a kind of aurora that more people can see than any other kind, because when it shows up, it shows up over more populated areas that are further to the south,” Elizabeth MacDonald, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and lead author of the new work, told Space.com. And scientifically, “it’s an aspect related to [auroras] that’s further south than we ever had recognized … It tells us that the processes creating the aurora are penetrating all the way into the inner magnetosphere, and so that’s a new aspect of it.” [Amazing Auroras: Photos of Earth’s Northern Lights].
Researchers first became aware of STEVE after members of a Facebook group called the Alberta Aurora Chasers (which refers to the province in western Canada) began posting photos of unusual purplish-greenish streaks oriented nearly vertically in the sky. Scientist collaborators coordinated with the aurora chasers to combine the dates and times of the phenomenon’s appearance with data from the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellites, which precisely measure variation in Earth’s magnetic field, to work out what conditions caused the phenomenon.
The better-known auroras — also referred to as the northern and southern lights — form when Earth’s magnetic field guides charged particles propelled from the sun around the planet and toward the upper atmosphere at its poles. These solar particles hit neutral particles in the upper atmosphere, producing light and color visible in the night sky.
STEVE, on the other hand, seems to form a different way.
“There’s an electric field in those regions that points poleward and a magnetic field that points downward, and those two together create this strong drift to the west,” MacDonald said. The flow in Earth’s ionosphere pulls charged solar particles westward, where they hit neutral particles along the way and heat them up, producing upward-reaching streaks of light moving west.
STEVE is the first visible indicator of that ion drift, which researchers had been investigating via satellite for around 40 years, she added.
Because the phenomenon was occurring outside the usual geographic range for frequent auroras, citizen scientists played a particularly valuable role in understanding STEVE, MacDonald said. It’s at the farthest reaches of dedicated scientific cameras, and it appears on wavelengths different from the usual auroras, which those cameras might not be prepared to document. And the improvement in camera technology available to the public means such records are increasingly valuable to scientists’ understanding of auroras in general. (Plus, crowdsourcing platforms like Aurorasaurus, which MacDonald founded, help aggregate the observations to help with prediction and analysis.)
Scientists understand a lot about auroras, but not everything — “so there’s the discovery aspect,” MacDonald said. “And there’s the less-exciting aspect of the citizen science observations,” which are equally scientifically valuable. “All these observations in aggregate help us to build better models of aurorae,” she added. “That’s useful for people who want to see it, and it’s also useful for people who are concerned about the effects of space weather and currents in the upper atmosphere on communication and things like that.”
It’s hard to get an overall view of auroras with the current slate of satellites, MacDonald said, which either can’t see an entire hemisphere or don’t observe each spot often enough as they orbit — once every 90 minutes — to track how auroras evolve in the short term. People on the ground can provide a more nuanced view.
“Through these kinds of projects, we can get more people than we would have thought — than theywould have thought — who actually have captured a scientifically valuable observation,” she said. “And it’s not scary; it’s just STEVE.”
The new work was detailed today (March 14) in the journal Science Advances.
I am as amused in seeing my first name in capital letters as I am hearing my last name — OK, her last name — announced during a basketball game, sometimes by myself.
There are photos …
Childs Lake, Manitoba Helena Lake Ranch, B.C. Lake Minnewanka, Alberta … and video of STEVE:
I am as amused to see my first name in capital letters as I am to hear my last name — actually her last name — announced during basketball games, sometimes by myself.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 