Facebook Friend Michael Smith:

There are now books being written, reviewed and discussed about why Hillary Clinton lost. She has publicly blamed educated white women, the Russians, James Comey in specific and males in general. The books blame her campaign organization and the fact she was simply a flawed candidate, one so flawed that she lost to an even more flawed candidate with a better strategy.

It’s actually very simple. Here are my 5 Reasons I Don’t Have to Wake Up to a President Hillary:

1. She lost because she expected to simply be anointed as victor. She was next in line and had lost in the 2008 primaries to a popular Democrat who was popular due to his race. She expected to ride the same wave of identity politics that popularized the idea that having a black president was somehow cathartic for America and evidence of America’s remorse over slavery. She expected that simply being a woman would give her the same or even greater advantage because there are even more women in America than guilty white liberals and blacks.

2. She lost because she was told she was a lock. That Hillary would be the First Woman President was a foregone conclusion in all the mass media. Before she announced, the MSM was begging her to run – just as they are begging Fauxcohantas Warren now. From the start, she was the anointed successor to Obama. The media sought to apologize for their tawdry, slavering love affair with Obama in 2008 that cost her the nomination by covering her with soft focused cameras and softball interviews. After all, in the world of a race obsessed media, while being black doesn’t trump being a woman, it trumps being a WHITE woman, so the media sought to elevate her as their apology for supporting Obama. In the Democrat party, racism always defeats feminism. Since even before the first vote was counted on election night she was considered the winner, instead of working for votes, her campaign simply took key battleground states for granted — and they lost them, albeit with narrow margins but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not the Electoral College.

3. She lost because she is a Clinton. Being a Clinton means that she is a lying, parsing, corrupt and self-absorbed political creature, one so self-absorbed and lacking such self-awareness as to believe everything bad that happens is someone else’s fault and all good things are direct results of her actions. More than that, the Clinton political stance is known to be more moderate than left wing — actually it is more political opportunistic than ideological — this was a death sentence in a Democrat Party that has moved so far left that it it now chaired and co-chaired by a committed socialist (Tom Perez) and a Muslim congressman with ties to radical Islamic groups and the unindicted co-conspirator organization, CAIR (Keith Ellison) and whose current “stars” are a Vermont socialist who isn’t even a Democrat and a raving lunatic communist, who lies about being Native American for purposes of personal advancement. I don’t think the party of Mondale ever forgave Billy Jeff for pausing the Democrat lurch to the left in 1992.

4. She lost because even rank and file, dirt under their fingernails Democrats thought she was a reprehensible human being. The private email server/national security breach/wipe it with a cloth thing mattered to them. The evasion, outright lies and misrepresentations mattered. Huma Abedin’s connections with the MoBros bothered them. The thought of two women running the White House who had such bad judgement to marry philandering sleazeballs like Bill Clinton and Carlos Danger bothered them. To a surprising majority of Democrats, character actually mattered.Beyond a small and dedicated group of Democrat insiders (including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazille and the Superdelegates), Hillary is despised — the more she appeared in public, the lower her poll numbers dropped.

5. She lost because she ran a “Prevent Defense” campaign. In the words of legendary football coach John Madden, the only thing a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning. Her opponent didn’t expect to win but campaigned to win. Trump targeted key states where he could move the needle with his populist message and win electoral votes and ignored those states that were lost (like California). They counted on her national “popularity” (as shown in the national polls) to carry the day when in actuality, Trump won narrow victories in enough battleground states to win a decisive Electoral College victory even as she won the popular vote by about 3 million votes (primarily from California and New York).

None of these 5 reasons should come as a surprise, they all have been known for years. These were just the things that had to be overlooked to assume another Clinton presidency.

One of those books is reviewed by John Podhoretz:

So guess what? In the last weeks before the election, the Hillary Clinton campaign did no polling. No. Polling. Whatsoever. Oh, it had data. Lots and lots of data. Analytics, even. Data analytics! But it had no independent information on the overall field of battle in states like Florida, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

So when the election began to turn Donald Trump’s way, the Clinton campaign had no idea.

This is one of the thousand revelations in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes that, for political junkies, redefines the word “juicy” for our time.

Campaign honcho Robby Mook “was worried about overspending . . . so he declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign.” Mook had learned from his time on the Obama 2012 campaign, Allen and Parnes write, that “old-school polling should be used for testing messages and gauging the sentiments of the electorate and that analytics were just as good for tracking which candidate was ahead and by how much in each state.”

Guess not.

Allen and Parnes report that the Republican National Committee did know — but just couldn’t accept it. The RNC didn’t brief reporters on early November polling data it had developed in Michigan and Pennsylvania “because the upticks there were so rosy that party officials didn’t believe their own data.”

The day after the election, Hillary asked Mook “which decisions had been misguided, where they had erred in strategy and tactics. ‘Our data was wrong,’ he said . . . ‘OK,’ she replied.”

It is true that, but for 100,000 votes in three states, Hillary Clinton would be president today. It is also true that she ended the election with 3 million more votes than Trump. But it is also true, as “Shattered” makes indisputably clear, that she was unquestionably the worst major presidential candidate in our lifetime.

Others (like Bob Dole) did far worse. But they likely never really had a shot. Hillary had no business losing an election to Donald Trump — but Allen and Parnes pile up headshaking detail after headshaking detail from the very beginning of her campaign to its end showing that she and her people were incapable of making a good call.

About anything.

David French adds:

Over at New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan is appalled at the Clinton family’s continued relevance:

It simply amazes me the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general. The most popular question that came from interviewer Nick Kristof’s social-media outreach, for example, was: “Are you doing okay?” Here’s Michelle Goldberg: “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?” Seriously, can you imagine anyone wondering the same after Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or John Kerry blew elections?

And everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was.

I must admit that I’ve been amazed as well. I thought the Democrats would drop the Clintons like a hot potato, but now we’re seeing Chelsea receive fawning treatment, and Hillary still gets glowing coverage from multiple partisan outlets. Why? If you’ll indulge some dime store theorizing, let me suggest that this is a simple function of human nature. We all tend to hate self-reflection. Since the #Resistance casts the political battle in such stark, moralistic terms, how can its members possibly face what they did when they nominated Hillary? Can they truly, humbly grapple with the consequences of nominating a corrupt machine politician for the presidency? Can they truly grapple with the full extent of her deceptions and evasions? No, a clear look in the mirror means acknowledging that 2016 wasn’t a battle of good versus evil but rather a battle between two of America’s most dishonest public figures. A clear look at 2016 means dismounting from the high horse, and no one likes to dismount from the high horse. So they rehabilitate Hillary. They embrace Chelsea. And they keep believing they were on the side of the angels all along.

If you’ll indulge some dime store theorizing, let me suggest that this is a simple function of human nature. We all tend to hate self-reflection. Since the #Resistance casts the political battle in such stark, moralistic terms, how can its members possibly face what they did when they nominated Hillary? Can they truly, humbly grapple with the consequences of nominating a corrupt machine politician for the presidency? Can they truly grapple with the full extent of her deceptions and evasions? No, a clear look in the mirror means acknowledging that 2016 wasn’t a battle of good versus evil but rather a battle between two of America’s most dishonest public figures. A clear look at 2016 means dismounting from the high horse, and no one likes to dismount from the high horse. So they rehabilitate Hillary. They embrace Chelsea. And they keep believing they were on the side of the angels all along.

No, a clear look in the mirror means acknowledging that 2016 wasn’t a battle of good versus evil but rather a battle between two of America’s most dishonest public figures. A clear look at 2016 means dismounting from the high horse, and no one likes to dismount from the high horse. So they rehabilitate Hillary. They embrace Chelsea. And they keep believing they were on the side of the angels all along.

They weren’t. But feel free to persist in your illusions, Democrats. They prevent you from finding someone to run against The Donald in 2020.

Democrats had their hearts set on winning a Georgia Congressional district in a special election Tuesday.

In the Georgia system, all candidates regardless of party compete in the same race. If a candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote, that candidate wins. If no candidate tops 50 percent, the top two candidates face off in a runoff election.

It was thought that the lone Democratic candidate in the field might top 50 percent and become the suburban Atlanta district’s next Congressman. He didn’t, so there will be a runoff election, and paradoxically the primary winner is now the underdog in the runoff.

And so Politico reports:

As it became clear late Tuesday evening that Jon Ossoff would fall just short of the 50-percent mark in the first round of voting in a suburban Atlanta special election, Democrats back in Washington started leafing through their calendars and asking: When does the winning start?

Ossoff’s moral victory — capturing 48 percent of the vote in a conservative-oriented district — was welcome, but after two successive close-but-no-cigar finishes in House special elections in Georgia and Kansas, a new worry is beginning to set in.

For all the anger, energy, and money swirling at the grassroots level, Democrats didn’t manage to pick off the first two Republican-held congressional seats they contended for in the Trump era, and the prospects aren’t markedly better in the next few House races coming up: the Montana race at the end of May, and the South Carolina contest on June 20.

Their best shot at knocking Donald Trump down a peg appears to be Ossoff’s runoff against Republican Karen Handel, also scheduled for June 20. But the Democrat will be an underdog in that contest, when there won’t be a crowded field of Republicans to splinter the vote.

After that, it’ll be another five months before the New Jersey and Virginia elections for governor, leaving some strategists and lawmakers wondering how to keep the furious rank-and-file voters engaged in fueling and funding the party’s comeback — especially given the sky-high expectations that surrounded Ossoff’s ultimately unsuccessful run at the 50-percent threshold that was necessary to win the seat outright.

“The resistance has it right: they are fighting mad, but they find joy in the fight. And so it’s not that anybody should be expected to gloss over the challenges that we have, or be Pollyanna about our situation as a country or as a party,” said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, decrying some of the party’s messaging describing the prospect of an Ossoff loss as devastating. “It’s just that there has to be a sense of momentum that builds over time and that requires that we define our objectives tightly — and that we are prepared to lose more than we win for the time being, but that we understand that we have the vast majority of the American people on our side, and history on our side.”

Democrats have posted a few successes in the opening months of the Trump era. They’ve slowed the new president’s agenda and overperformed in a slew of low-profile state legislative races. By any measure, Ossoff’s strong performance in Georgia and the 20-point swing toward the Democratic nominee in last week’s Kansas special election are impressive accomplishments given the conservative orientation of those districts. But they still fall under the category of loss mitigation, not concrete victories against a president the party loathes.

Now, with Ossoff falling short of an outright win despite an unprecedented surge of campaign cash and national attention — in a district which Hillary Clinton lost by just one point in 2016 — comes the potential for another round of finger-pointing within the party. The worry: that if operatives and voters continue their practice of quietly blaming each other for losses, as they did after a narrow defeat outside of Wichita last week, the current level of runaway enthusiasm and budding trust in the national party leadership could sputter out long before the 2018 midterms.

“Whatever happens over the next few weeks, it’s critical that rank-and-file Democrats feel like the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] left it all on the playing field,” said longtime party strategist Simon Rosenberg, president of the NDN think tank.

After attorney James Thompson came within seven points of winning the race for CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s old seat in Kansas last week, some leading progressive voices, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, were quick to blame national Democrats for not spending enough time and energy to help Thompson. Since then, DCCC and Democratic National Committee officials have been sure to detail the work they’ve done for the party ahead of Ossoff’s race.

With the approach of a Montana contest that will see national resources poured in while political celebrities like Sanders descend on the state to support candidate Rob Quist, the question Democrats are asking themselves is whether it will be enough — and how to keep the grassroots fires stoked as Trump’s administration passes its first 100 days mark. Trump won Montana by 21 points, after all, and the race in Georgia to replace HHS Secretary Tom Price illustrated that a combination of Republican infighting, the Trump factor and an avalanche of campaign cash still isn’t enough to guarantee Democratic success.

The South Carolina race to replace Budget Director Mick Mulvaney will take place under similarly difficult conditions — in a district Trump won by 18 points, and in a state where he won by 14.

One way to avoid a letdown, some Democrats say, is to train the focus on legislative fights where Democrats have slowed the White House, from its travel ban to the attempt to repeal Obamacare. Party operatives figure pushes like that might be enough to keep the base energized as opportunities to push back on individual policies surface.

“People are responding to Trump, and as long as Trump is in office they will continue to respond,” said Democratic pollster Margie Omero. “There are plenty of other avenues for engagement. Constant meetings and groups popping up all over the country. You have corporate motivated efforts that people are taking to make sure that companies they support have political views that line up with their own. You have the groundswell of activism against [Neil] Gorsuch, and then you have the protests like the tax protest or the climate ones coming down the pike. So there’s lots of opportunity for opposing the president. [Yes,] as long there’s voting people are going to be paying a lot of attention to it. But it goes beyond that.”

The fact that Democrats have picked themselves up off the ground since Election Day to mount a resistance at all creates a positive feedback loop, they believe — pointing to local legislative races as evidence of an optimistic trend.

“The biggest driver of enthusiasm right now is the rejection of Trump and the Trump agenda,” said party strategist Jesse Ferguson, a former top official at the party’s House campaign wing. “There have been far more successes in resisting the Trump administration than anyone would have expected on November 10, whether it’s beating back the health care repeal or some of these special elections in state legislatures, or closer-than-expected congressional races.”

With the political map glaringly free of obvious near-term win opportunities, Schatz believes the party’s messaging needs some refining. In his view, that means officials at the DCCC should cut the doom-and-gloom messaging in their fundraising emails — a significant way the party communicates with backers.

“I don’t mind the occasional call to action that is based on a negative emotion, it’s the declaring final defeat at the start of the third quarter that bugs me. ‘All is lost’ is a preposterous thing to say to a voter or a donor, and to use words like ‘crushing’ is a total misunderstanding of how to motivate people,” he said on Tuesday, just hours before the DCCC sent out a Nancy Pelosi-signed note with the subject line “crushing loss.”

“The point to be made here is this is Tom Price’s seat,” he added. “One of the most conservative people in the United States House. And when he vacated his seat nobody thought it was going to be a problem for national Republicans and competitive for us. So if we can keep up this competitiveness, it’s going to be a really interesting year in 2018. But if we define our success as winning in Kansas, Montana, and Georgia, we’re setting ourselves up for potential disappointment.”

With today, instead of April 15, being Tax Day, the American Enterprise Institute takes us back to the institution of the income tax in 1913, when the tax form looked like this:

1. Some Historical Perspective. “In the beginning” when the US federal income tax was first introduced in 1913, it used to be a lot, lot simpler and a lot easier to file taxes; so easy in fact that it was basically like filling out your federal tax return on a postcard.

For example, page 1 of the original IRS 1040 income tax form from 1913 appears above. There were only four pages in the original 1040 form, including: two pages of worksheets, the actual one-page 1040 form above, and only one page of instructions, view all four pages here. In contrast, just the current 1040 instructions for 2016, without any forms, runs 106 pages.

Individual federal income tax rates started at 1% in 1913, and the maximum marginal income tax rate was only 7% on incomes above $500,000 (more than $12 million in today’s dollars). The personal exemption in 1913 was $3,000 for individuals ($72,850 in today’s dollars) and $4,000 for married couples ($97,000 in today’s dollars), meaning that very few Americans had to pay federal income tax since the average income in 1913 was only about $750. The Tax Foundation has historical federal income tax rates for every year between 1913 and 2013 here for tax brackets expressed in both nominal dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars.

2. Tax Graphic of the Day …

3. Opportunity Cost. In a 2012 report to Congress (most recent data available), the National Taxpayer Advocate estimated that American taxpayers and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours every year complying with the income tax code, based on IRS estimates of how much time taxpayers (both individual and businesses) spend collecting data for, and filling out their tax forms. In addition, Americans will spend an estimated $10 billion for the services of tax preparation firms and $2 billion on tax-preparation software programs like TurboTax that still require many hours of time.

The amount of time spent for income tax compliance – 6.1 billion hours – would be the equivalent of more than 3 million Americans working full-time, year-round (or 2.1% of total US payrolls of 145.9 million). By way of comparison, the federal government currently employs 2.8 million full-time workers, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer, currently employs 2.2 million workers worldwide and 1.3 million workers in the US (both full-time and part-time). At the current average hourly wage of $21.90 an hour, the dollar value of the opportunity cost associated with tax filing would be more than $131 billion, slightly more than the 2016 GDP of Washington, D.C. ($127 billion).

As T.R. Reid pointed out recently in a New York Times op-ed, it really doesn’t have to be that way. For example:

In Japan, you get a postcard in early spring from Kokuzeicho (Japan’s I.R.S.) that says how much you earned last year, how much tax you owed and how much was withheld. If you disagree, you go into the tax office to work it out. For nearly everybody, though, the numbers are correct, so you never have to file a return.

 

4. Tax Progressivity. And just how progressive is the US federal income tax system? Very, very progressive, see the chart above showing average effective tax rates by various income groups in 2014 (most recent year available). That pattern of income tax progressivity explains why almost all federal income taxes are paid by the top income groups. …

 

5. Tax Progressivity and Tax Burden. According to the most recent IRS data, the federal income tax shares by six different income groups are displayed in the chart above. Almost all federal income taxes (97.3%) are paid by the top 50%, more than 2/3 of income taxes are paid for by the top 10% and nearly 40% of taxes are paid by the top 1% of taxpayers. For all of the criticism and negative publicity the “Top 1%” get, I’d like to personally thank that group this year at tax time for shouldering such a disproportionate share of our collective tax burden. It’s a form of “disparate impact” on the 1% that we all benefit from! So, I say “Thank You Top 1%” from all of us in the bottom 99% for your valuable and significant contribution to our nation’s tax burden.

 

6. Tax Burden of the Top 1% vs. the Bottom 95%. The chart above gives us another perspective on the tax burden of the top 1% over time, and compares the tax share of that group to the tax burden of the bottom 95% in every year between 1980 and 2014 (most recent year available). In 2014, the top 1% earned 20.6% of the total income reported to the IRS and paid 39.4% of all federal income taxes collected ($543 billion). The bottom 95% of US taxpayers earned 64% of total income (almost three times as much as the top 1%) and paid only 40.5% of the total income taxes collected ($550 billion). So once again, to the 1.395 million taxpayers in the top 1%, I say “Thank You” for paying almost as much in federal income taxes in 2013 as the 132.6 million taxpayers in the bottom 95% by income. …

8. Coincidence? Why are Tax Day (April 15) and Voting Day (first Tuesday in November) so far apart? Couldn’t we move Tax Day to the first Monday in November or Voting Day to the first Tuesday following April 15? …

10. 20 Inspirational Quotes about Taxes from Forbes, here are a few good ones:

“The taxpayer: that’s someone who works for the federal government, but doesn’t have to take a civil service examination.”–Ronald Reagan

“We have what it takes to take what you have.”–Suggested IRS Motto 

“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates.”–John F. Kennedy

“I am proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is I could be just as proud for half of the money.”–Arthur Godfrey

“A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.”–G. Gordon Liddy