Today in 1975, one of the stranger episodes in rock music history ended when John Lennon got permanent resident status, his “green card.” The federal government, at the direction of Richard Nixon, tried to deport Lennon because of his 1968 British arrest for possession of marijuana. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that trying to deport Lennon on the basis of an arrest was “contrary to U.S. ideas of due process and was invalid as a means of banishing the former Beatle from America.”
The number one British single today in 1978 came from that day’s number one album:
The number one album today in 1989 was Tears for Fears’ “Seeds of Love”:
Charlie Sykes posted this on the Right Wisconsin website, “powered by Charlie Sykes”:
This morning, I announced that I am stepping down from my daily radio show on WTMJ at the end of this year:
“It has been both a pleasure and honor to work here,” said Sykes. “It has been an extraordinary privilege to be a part of the momentous changes that have taken place in Wisconsin over the last two decades. This is not a decision that I made either lightly or recently and it was not driven by this year’s political season. I made this decision more than a year ago for both professional and very personal reasons. My father died when he was 63, and I will turn 62 this year, so this year has always been circled on my calendar. Frankly, if I was ever going to make a move, it was now. While I am stepping back from my daily radio duties I intend to remain an active voice. I want to write more, travel more and pursue new opportunities.”
I know that lot of people will assume that my decision has something to do with this current campaign and the rise of Trumpism. But, the reality (as my friends and family know) is that I made this decision a long time ago. Twenty-three years is a long time to do a radio show and most hosts don’t get to go out on their own terms. So I’m lucky to have had that chance.
But it would also be fair to say that this campaign has made the decision easier. The conservative movement has been badly damaged; obviously the conservative media is broken as well. So this is a good time for step back, sit down for a while, and ask “What the hell just happened here?” …
I intend to continue to write and edit RightWisconsin.com and remain editor of Wisconsin Interest Magazine.And I plan to spend much of the next year working on a book about the crackup of the conservative movement. My working title is “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”
I’ll have more to say later about my other plans. But I keep thinking of what my one of my early mentors said when I asked what he planned to do after retirement.
“I plan to sit on a rocking chair on my front porch,” he said. “After a couple of weeks, I plan to start rocking. Slowly.”
When Wisconsin conservative radio host Charlie Sykes made the surprise announcement this week that he would depart his radio show at year’s end, theories sprung up on why and what’s next for him.
Sykes batted away one of them Wednesday: that he’s mulling a challenge to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2018.
This week Robert Kraig -— in a post to the website of the liberal group he directs, Citizen Action of Wisconsin — floated the prospect of a Sykes Senate run as “the hot rumor in Republican political circles.” Kraig is not the only person to share that suggestion with Wisconsin political reporters in recent weeks.
Baldwin’s first U.S. Senate term is up in two years, and there likely will be plenty of Republicans vying to challenge her.
But Sykes told the Wisconsin State Journal he won’t be one of them. He called the idea “ludicrous conspiracy mongering from the depths of the left wing fever swamps.”
“My interest in running for anything is subzero,” Sykes said. …
Kraig, in his post, suggested Sykes might be distancing himself from Trump — who polls show is not viewed favorably in Wisconsin and elsewhere — and his own past controversial statements to launch his own run for office.”
We can’t let Charlie Sykes run away from his right-wing radio past if he runs against Tammy in 2018,” Kraig wrote.
Readers know I’ve appeared on his “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” back when I was a Northeast Wisconsin pundit and we had the same employer:
For some reason I look 25 percent larger than everyone on set on this show. The smaller people are (from left) Jeff Fleming, Mikel Holt, Sykes and … I’m not sure.
And after one show, where I had to bring our sons along (mom and sister were on a girls-weekend-away thing) …
… they got their photo on the TMJ4 news set.
Sykes’ WTMJ show started in 1993, when conservatism wasn’t doing very well nationally, given the election of Bill Clinton and (re)election of a Democrat-controlled Congress. Wisconsin had Gov. Tommy Thompson and a Republican-controlled Senate, but Democrat-controlled Assembly. Sykes previously had substituted for WISN radio’s Mark Belling, who had come there in 1989 from the former WTDY radio in Madison. (Belling in turn sometimes subs for Rush Limbaugh, whose show precedes Belling’s on WISN.)
While Belling has been around longer, Sykes has had far more influence, to the point of being the object of the so-called “Sykes effect,” his influence over Republican legislators whose constituents listen to WTMJ. Sykes also has authored several books that have gotten him national attention in the commentariat, particularly about education. WISN’s owners didn’t create a website for Belling; WTMJ’s owners did, Right Wisconsin.
To say the least, a lot of water has gone under the political bridge since 1993, including Clinton, the 1994 Demodisaster, the Brewers’ stadium deal, Rep. Scott Walker’s election as Milwaukee County executive, the rise of Paul Ryan through the House of Representatives, Hillary Clinton, the month-long election of George W. Bush, 9/11, James Doyle, the caucus scandal, the Great Recession, Barack Obama’s election, the rise of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, the election of Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker as governor in the 2010 Demodisaster, the rise of Ron Johnson and fall of Russ Feingold the phony maverick, the Act 10 debate and Recallarama, the John Doe persecution, the Obama Recovery In Name Only, Walker’s brief run for president, and now this traveshamockery of a presidential election.
Sykes has presented a mostly consistent conservative/libertarian point of view all this time (in fact, in the 1990s Sykes identified himself as a small-L libertarian) while generating enough listeners to generate enough advertising revenue for his employers. His detractors claim his three marriages (the second to one of Trump’s supposed Supreme Court candidates, if you can trust Trump, who himself is on his third marriage) as not representing family values. Of course, libertarians value privacy, and divorcing your spouse is, I guess, more honest than, say, Bill Clinton and his chronic bimbo eruptions, aided and abetted by his “wife,” the current Democratic presidential candidate. He has also represented one of the poles of the Wisconsin GOP, suburban Milwaukee, which figures as a Milwaukee talk show host. (Green Bay’s Jerry Bader represents another pole, northeastern Wisconsin; of the talk radio Big Four, Vicki McKenna, in the bowels of the People’s Republic of Madison, would seem to have the hardest job.)
I wrote “mostly consistent.” The maxim of politics making for strange bedfellows applies to talk radio too. Sykes strayed from the small-government thing by supporting the five-county sales tax for Miller Park under the premise that Milwaukee would suffer if the Brewers left. Sykes supported then-U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett (D-Milwaukee) for Milwaukee mayor against Marvin Pratt, the city council president who became mayor after John Norquist resigned. (Norquist was right about school choice, and for a Democrat he had more appreciation for markets than any Milwaukee mayor before or since then.) Sykes also treated Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dick Leinenkugel a bit harshly because Leinenkugel had served as Doyle’s secretary of commerce.
Sykes’ job (as well as the jobs of Belling, Bader and McKenna, and for that matter Limbaugh) drives Wisconsin liberals nuts. They are under the impression that the broadcast media’s job is to present their point of view — I mean, present someone’s definition of “both” points of view — instead of making money for their owners. (Because media outlets are businesses first, believe it or don’t. The airwaves as a public trust stopped mattering when Internet access became widespread.) If Sykes didn’t make money for WTMJ’s owner, Sykes would have been fired long ago. Sykes brought in listeners who were not merely conservativish, but had desirable demographics, such as income and disposable income. There is basically one local (that is, non-nationally syndicated) liberal talk show host on commercial radio. That fact and the collapse of previous liberal talk radio attempts (including hosts who followed Sykes on WTMJ) prove that, until ratings and ad revenue say otherwise, conservative talk radio isn’t going anywhere.
Sykes also has drawn considerable heat from conservatives who should know better for Sykes’ opposition to Trump the non-Republican and non-conservative, which (along with the opposition of Belling, Bader and McKenna) had something to do with Trump’s loss to Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin GOP primary. Given the fact that not a day goes by without Trump’s saying something ridiculously embarrassing (for instance, Trump’s appearance on Sykes’ show), Sykes is right, and Trump’s conservative supporters are mistaken. (For one thing, as you know, the Trump conservatives support is not a real person.) Sykes appears more committed to Republican victory than some Republicans do, given the unlikelihood of Trump’s getting elected and the real possibility of Trump’s loss dragging down other Republicans with him.
Sykes’ radio show was probably self-selecting in audience, but his TV show has given non-conservatives a voice, most consistently Holt, who supports school choice because he has seen for decades how bad Milwaukee Public Schools is. He also gave me a chance to appear, and it always amazed me that people would tell me they watched me.
Sykes, and not Bill Gates, also authored this list in his Dumbing Down Our Kids:
Rule 1: Life is not fair, get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it’s not your parents’ fault so don’t whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one…
No one is irreplaceable in the media, except for Paul Harvey. Sykes said he won’t miss getting up at 4:15 a.m. before his 8:30 a.m. show. Sykes and I both worked for Journal Communications, which formerly owned the state’s biggest newspaper, single 50,000-watt radio station and oldest commercial TV station, but no more. (And I’ll always be grateful to Sykes for reaching out after Journal Communications terminated Marketplace.) Vin Scully announced Dodger baseball for 67 years, but no more.
Sykes may think that his job isn’t as fun as it used to be. (See the aforementioned 4:15 a.m. wake-up call.) He has done considerable writing over the years, and obviously plans on continuing that. Those of us in the media work in an environment that is continuously and unpredictably changing, which includes people who think they can do our jobs while lacking the training, experience, initiative and willingness to actually do the work. Politics is like sports in that it has winners and losers, but the political season never ends.
Sykes also has publicly pondered the role of conservative talk radio in promoting, mostly by accident, Trump. The Christian Science Monitor recently profiled Sykes:
For Sykes, the conservative media’s disdain for “liberal” truths – the “monster” – allowed Trump to crash the GOP party and claim its mantle. He says his own listeners, like “Steve from the north side,” refuse to read conservative columnists in The New York Times because they prefer online sources that traffic in lurid allegations about the other side, just as Trump imbibes conspiracies and rumors and fashions them into a 24/7 media spectacle that can seem immune to fact-checking.
“This is the shock of 2016. You look around and you see how much of the conservative media infrastructure buys into the post-factual, post-truth culture…. I understand that we are advocates and defenders, but when do you veer off into pure raw propaganda?” he asks.
One of Sykes’s biggest beefs with Trump is that his views on race and gender have confirmed all the stereotypes applied by liberals to conservative politicians and made it even harder for future GOP leaders to broaden the party’s appeal among minorities. His other complaints about Trump are familiar ones: unqualified and intemperate, inconsistent on issues like abortion and gun control, shaky on constitutional principles.
Sykes refuses to consider Trump as the lesser of two evils for the job as president, as so many fellow Republicans have done in recent months. “It’s painful for me to listen to conservative media folks who think it’s their job to rationalize and justify everything that he says,” he gripes.
Sykes’ departure from daily radio will certainly be the end of an era. Replacing Sykes — assuming WTMJ wants to keep going in that direction — won’t be easy for either WTMJ or for Sykes’ replacement, particularly in the wreckage of the post-2016 election.
Curtis Houck reports on Wisconsin native Jim Vandehei:
On Tuesday morning, one of the more intriguing debates about media bias took place on MSNBC’s Morning Joe as the assembled co-hosts and Politico founder Jim Vandehei excoriated their colleagues in the media for flashing their liberal bias “in a way they never did before” in their collective desire to take down Donald Trump (to the benefit of Hillary Clinton).
Co-host Joe Scarborough made clear at the onset that opinion-based media figures as himself are different because he’s paid to opine whereas the job of a reporter for a top newspaper has been to be neutral but end up doing “the end zone dance…opining as irresponsibly as if they were like me.”
Vandehei then fired back with the disclosure that he’s typically never been a big believer in media bias, but 2016 has left him convinced otherwise:
In a way they never did before like I’ve said this before. I’ve always been a defender of the media. I think these accusations of bias are usually overdone. I think that that’s all out the door, all out the window in this campaign. I think reporters have become so biased, so partisan, particularly on Twitter.
“Go look at the Twitter feeds of the reporters from your major newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, others — and tell me if those are things that they would say on TV or that would have ever been acceptable in previous campaigns….Just let the facts be out there and let people make a judgment,” Vandehei added.
Co-host and Sunday Today host Willie Geist further observed that “[s]omewhere along the line in this presidential race, a decision was made by many members of the media that Trump had to be stopped, that this couldn’t happen, that this year was different, that it was incumbent on people to stop [him]” and leaves readers shocked when they see their tweets then read their print stories.
Vandehei agreed and struck at one of the main tenets of journalism in that by espousing their liberal or anti-Trump views on Twitter, “they’re not speaking truth to power”:
They’re not saying anything that we don’t already know. Trump says everything that people need to hear and they are making their judgements on him. They’re not helping it by — by doing — it’s not just an end-zone dance, they’re doing their little shimmy and they all like slap each other on the back — “haha, you’re even wittier than I was.”
Harkening back to a time before the internet and social media, Scarborough wondered aloud to co-host and longtime Boston Globe write Mike Barnicle:
I can’t imagine what would have happened in the Boston Globe newsroom in 1985 if — some reporter, you know, that was supposed to write a straight-down-the-middle news story is doing this sort of end zone dances and again we are — please — we are all offended by what Donald Trump said.
Barnicle responded with the befuddlement that more newspaper editors don’t have stricter social media policies in an age when record numbers of Americans don’t trust the media:
Look, I am actually kinda surprised that in an age where it may be 99 percent of the people in the country thinks the media tilts left and thinks the media is biased that more editors and publishers actually don’t tell reporters, stay off Twitter, you can’t go on Twitter because all you do with Twitter is get yourself in trouble and raise these questions[.]
Geist helped wind down the discussion by making clear to the liberal diehards watching that they were supportive of the media being “tough as hell on both of these candidates” with one example being The New York Times story on Trump’s taxes.
“I think objectivity is a totally false premise and people are humans. They come with their biases, but your job is to just cover the race fairly. I don’t want to think what you hear about it on Twitter if you’re a reporter. Opinion business? Go for it,” Geist stated.
You had better get on board for the number one song today in 1970:
The number one song today in 1973:
Britain’s number one album tonight in 1984 was David Bowie’s “Tonight”:
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The number one album today in 2002 was “Elvis Presley’s Number One Hits,” despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Presley had been dead for 25 years:
Strangely, “Elvis Presley’s Number One Hits” didn’t include this number one hit:
Just two birthdays of note, and they were on the same day: Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon …
… was born the same day as David Hidalgo of Los Lobos:
David French writes about the big news of earlier this week:
… with minimal fanfare and attention, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ended one of the most shameful abuses of power in recent American history, rejecting the request of three Democratic prosecutors to restart their so-called “John Doe” investigations of conservative activity in the recall campaign against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.
It is hard to do justice to the scale of this outrage. As I detailed at length in a story last year, Wisconsin prosecutors used an obscure provision of state law to launch a secret investigation into alleged illegal “coordination” between conservative organizations and the Walker campaign. In one day, a local judge named Barbara Kluka approved hundreds of pages of subpoenas, petitions, and search warrants.
Then prosecutors acted. In a coordinated series of dawn raids, armed police officers raided the homes of conservative activists, barging into sleeping children’s rooms, confiscating cell phones and computers, carting off files, and ordering the targets of the raids to keep quiet. Despite the fact that the raids occurred in full view of the public, the victims were unable to defend themselves: They couldn’t tell friends or family, and they couldn’t talk to the media. A cloud of suspicion hovered over their lives.
The raids themselves were terrifying. In anonymous interviews, victim after victim described to me the pounding on the door, the rush of officers into their homes, the investigators strutting about, taking their personal belongings, and ordering them to be silent, or else.
At the same time, these partisan inquisitors were securing copies of the victims’ electronic records without their knowledge, gaining access to all of their personal and professional communications. This was a witch hunt, designed to persecute American citizens for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.
This was a witch hunt, designed to persecute American citizens for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. One of the search warrants in the case empowered police to seize “any and all documents or records which show direct or indirect coordination or consultation with Friends of Scott Walker (hereafter FOSW) and/or the FOSW campaign or the 2011/2012 senate personal campaign committees for the recall elections.” The warrant also allowed investigators to take “all documents” relating to the “recall campaign for Wisconsin State senators,” to the “gubernatorial recall campaign from 2011 and 2012,” and to communications with a host of conservative organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, American Crossroads, and the Republican Governors Association.
Late last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court finally halted the investigations, holding in no uncertain terms that prosecutors were attacking constitutionally protected speech:
The special prosecutor has disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right and is afforded the highest level of protection. The special prosecutor’s theories, rather than “assur[ing] [the] unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people” . . . instead would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished.
The prosecutors were undeterred by this rebuke. They appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court, and when SCOTUS refused to hear the case, they issued an unapologetically defiant statement, stating that they were “proud to have taken this fight as far as the law would allow” and looked “forward to the day when Wisconsin adopts a more enlightened view of the need for transparency in campaign finance.” The irony of using secret criminal investigations to fight for “transparency” apparently escaped these tinpot fascists.
While conservative and local media have covered the John Doe investigations, the national media, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, have been largely indifferent. Yet can you imagine the outcry if a southern state’s election commission sent cops across five counties to execute predawn raids against members of the NAACP, or if police officers from an energy-producing state descended on the homes of Sierra Club members? Obama’s Department of Justice would hand down indictments, and Hollywood would produce multiple treatments of the story depicting brave activists fighting American tyranny. I wonder why that hasn’t happened here.
Rogue prosecutors, including Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm, should be held accountable for the John Doe investigations, but the failure goes beyond them. The initial John Doe judge should have rejected the initial search warrants, police should have refused to launch intimidating raids, and investigators who taunted vulnerable and terrified families should be ashamed of themselves.
Electorally and politically secure in deep-blue urban strongholds, some progressive prosecutors are choosing to criminalize political differences. Chisholm’s witch-hunt in Wisconsin has echoes of prosecutors’ attacks in Austin, Texas, on Tom DeLay, Rick Perry (who was actually prosecuted for a veto), and whistleblowing University of Texas regent Wallace Hall. Not to be outdone, blue-state attorneys general have launched fraud investigations into scientific questions about “climate change,” while simultaneously resisting congressional subpoenas inquiring about their own anti-constitutional activities.
The message is clear. To many progressives, transparency is my obligation, not theirs. Free speech is their right, not mine. Social justice must be achieved by any means necessary, and if innocent parents and children suffer for it, well then to them that’s just a bonus. Conservatives, after all, get what they deserve.
I’m sure you’ll be shocked — shocked! — to find out that The Donald is wrong about free trade generally and the North American Free Trade Agreement specifically.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady takes on the claim that free trade hurt the U.S. automobile industry:
Donald Trump said during the first presidential debate that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) “is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country.” Such hyperbolic rhetoric—butchered syntax and all—was undoubtedly cheered by his base. But it is not supported by the facts. As a result it harms his case with Republican holdouts, whom Mr. Trump needs to win but who distrust his fast-and-loose economics.
The Republican is promising to force a renegotiation of Nafta. But he doesn’t seem to realize that Mexico gave up more tariff protection than the U.S. did when the agreement was signed in 1993. If Nafta is reopened, Mexico is unlikely to accept new limits on its access to the U.S. market. If a standoff leads to the end of Nafta, both countries would revert to their commitments under World Trade Organization rules and the existing “most-favored nation” tariff schedule. That would hurt, not help, the U.S. economy.
Mr. Trump is so reckless on trade that he makes Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who wrote the book on Big Labor protectionism, seem sane. At least she acknowledged in the debate the importance of opening new markets abroad. “We are 5% of the world’s population. We have to trade with the other 95%,” she said.
Unfortunately neither of the candidates is good on this critical issue but the Republicans advising Mr. Trump should know better. His attempt to slam Nafta by pointing to a 16% value-added tax that Mexican importers pay, for example, is misleading. This tax applies to transactions on both foreign and domestic-made goods, like the New York sales tax. It doesn’t discriminate against imports, and the importer recovers it by charging it to the customer. That’s Econ 101.
Nafta disrupted the economic status quo in the U.S.—as it did in Mexico. There have been winners and losers. But the U.S. dislocations are minor compared with those that occur from technological advances or when companies move production from high-tax, union-dominated U.S. states to low-tax, right-to-work states, and especially so when compared with the economic efficiencies gained.
Mr. Trump gave a quick nod to one genuine U.S. disadvantage during the debate when he talked about cutting U.S. corporate tax rates to spur investment at home. But his main message was that under Nafta Mexico is “stealing” U.S. jobs.
In fact, an interconnected North American economy has made U.S. manufacturing globally competitive. U.S. companies source components from Mexico and Canada and add value in innovation, design and marketing. The final outputs are among the most high-quality, low-price products in the world.
U.S. automotive competitiveness is highly dependent on global free trade. According to the Mexico City-based consulting firm De la Calle, Madrazo, Mancera, 37% of the U.S.’s imported auto components came from Mexico and Canada in 2015. This sourcing from abroad is important to good-paying U.S. auto-assembly jobs. But parts also flow the other way. U.S. parts manufacturers sent 61% of their exports to Mexico and Canada in 2015.
This synergy has made the U.S. auto industry attractive for investment. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis investment in the auto sector contracted. But from 2010-14 almost $70 billion was invested in the North American automotive industry. Mr. Trump claims that investment is going to Mexico but two-thirds of it went into the U.S., according to a January 2015 report by the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research.
This investment dynamism helped generate 264,800 new U.S. jobs in motor-vehicle production and parts between January 2010 and June 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a 40% increase in employment despite the increasing trend toward robotics in the industry. Shut down Nafta and these workers and future job seekers will pay.
U.S. agriculture would also suffer. U.S. farm products now enter Mexico practically tariff-free and in 2013 (the latest year that data is available) it was the third-largest foreign market for U.S. farm output after China and Canada.
Let’s suppose that Mexico won’t give up ground in a new round of negotiations and Mr. Trump is successful in leading the repeal of Nafta. That would mean a reversion back to the WTO-agreed duties that each country charges nations without trade agreements. In 2013 Mexico’s weighted average tariff on agricultural products was 38.4%, which would be quite a climb over the zero tariff-rate that U.S. exporters now face. U.S. manufacturers that ship to Mexico would be hit with a weighted average tariff on industrial goods of 7.7%.
Keep in mind that Mexico has many bilateral trade agreements. Competitors from those countries would have large duty-free advantages over American farmers and manufacturers.
Mr. Trump’s outlandishness is supposed to be one of his strengths. But when it comes to trade he is not politically incorrect. He is factually incorrect.
How any Wisconsinite can support Trump is beyond me. Agriculture is one-third of this state’s economy, and ag is very reliant on exports. The importance of ag exports has been an agreed-upon point by both Democrats and Republicans for decades. Trump would torpedo one-third of this state’s economy to protect … what? AMC cars?
The New York Times reported Saturday that it had received an anonymous gift in the mail of three pages from three of Mr. Trump’s state tax returns from 1995. The real-estate and casino magnate, who was having well-known business problems at the time, reported a loss of $916 million on those New Jersey, New York and Connecticut returns.
The Times concludes from these losses and after consulting those it called “tax experts” that the resulting tax deduction “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.” Cue the synthetic shock and outrage.
Note that word “legally.” No one, not even the Clinton campaign, is claiming Mr. Trump broke any tax laws 20 years ago. Had he done so you can bet the IRS would have noticed, since the tax agency doesn’t routinely ignore tax losses that large.
The details from three pages are scant and don’t reveal the specific tax deductions that Mr. Trump might have exploited in 1995 or other years. But even average taxpayers who declare self-employment income know that business losses are deductible, often across several years. This reflects that the cycle of business investment and sales isn’t confined to a calendar tax year.
The real-estate business is also notorious for complex accounting and depreciation practices that can reduce tax liability. Developers borrow heavily, and the interest on that debt is deductible. Mr. Trump didn’t write the tax laws he was exploiting, though President Bill Clinton did have a hand in writing them since he pushed a major tax bill through Congress in 1993 with a Democratic Congress. Maybe Hillary Clinton should blame her husband and party for tolerating such rules.
What is illegal in this story is that someone disclosed Mr. Trump’s tax returns without his permission. The Times reports that the postmark on the documents indicates they were sent from New York City, and the “return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.” The Trump Tower bit is probably a joke, and the sender could have traveled to New York from anywhere to send them.
But the tax-return leak was nonetheless all too predictable. The Trump campaign is attacking the newspaper for publishing the documents, but publication is not a crime. Releasing it is. The left is committed to defeating Mr. Trump by whatever means possible, and many believe this end justifies any means, much as progressives have justified theEdward Snowden leaks despite the damage to national security.
Mr. Trump also invited this October surprise by refusing to release his tax returns. Had he done so last year, when we advised him to, the debate over the details would have burned itself out. The smart play in politics is transparency to give your opponents nowhere to go.
The Clintons can count on a protective press corps to ignore or forgive their email and Clinton Foundation deceptions, but Republicans will never get that break. Mitt Romneymade the same mistake by waiting to release his 2011 tax return until September 2012, and George W. Bush almost lost in 2000 when someone disclosed his drunk-driving conviction shortly before Election Day. Don’t Republicans understand that their secrets will always be exposed, and at the most damaging moment?
Mr. Trump hasn’t helped his cause by boasting about how “smart” he is for paying little tax. This is the vainglorious Trump who can’t stand to be criticized. He should be saying instead that the tax code is dumb. He could say he’s fortunate to have the means to hire lawyers and accountants who can maneuver through the tax maze to cut his payments. But he knows most Americans aren’t so lucky.
He could also say that Mrs. Clinton’s tax plans all but guarantee that the rich would pay less in taxes. She wants to raise rates, which would invite the rich to lobby Congress for more loopholes, which it would eventually pass, which would be fine for the Clintons and Donald Trump but be terrible for middle-class Americans and the economy.
As it is, the current tax system is just fine for the Clintons, reports Zero Hedge:
And Hillary following up, adding Trump “apparently got to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades—while tens of millions of working families paid theirs.”
While not on the scale of Trump’s business “operating loss”, Hillary Clinton – like many ‘wealthy’ individuals is taking advantage of a legal scheme to use historical losses to avoid paying current taxes.
As Bloomberg notes, this federal tax break is among the wealthy’s most used avoidance schemes…
Those 1.1 million folks in the 1 percent, as measured by the TPC, have annual income that averages a little less than $700,000. The top one-tenth of that group, some 110,000 households, average about $3.6 million, according to Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the TPC.2
The middle of the pack, some 33 million people, have pretax income ranging from $45,000 to $80,000. The lowest one-fifth of taxpayers, a universe of about 47 million Americans, have income up to about $24,000.
Among the biggest of these givebacks, courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service (well, really Congress), are capital gains and dividends—these are the biggest way the wealthiest benefit.
In the words of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, “this bombshell report reveals [Hillary Clinton’s] past business failures… and may show just how long [Hillary Clinton] may have avoided paying taxes.”
* * *
Finally, as we noted previously, the NYT itself is also perfectly happy to take advantage of the US tax to minimize the amount of money it pays to the government: in 2014 the company got a tax refund of $3.6 million despite having a $29.9 million pretax profit, an effective negative tax rate for 2014, which it explained was favorably affected by approximately $21.1 million for the reversal of reserves for uncertain tax positions due to the lapse of applicable statutes of limitations.
Today in 1957, the sixth annual New Music Express poll named Elvis Presley the second most popular singer in Great Britain behind … Pat Boone. That seems as unlikely as, say, Boone’s recording a heavy metal album.
The number one British song today in 1962, coming to you via satellite:
Britain’s number one album today in 1969 was the Beatles’ “Abbey Road”:
Rich Galen nicely summarizes the first October Surprise of the 2016 campaign:
In light of what was in all probability an illegally leaked copy of a couple of pages of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return, we now know he paid no federal income taxes for 18 years.
It seems that Trump lost $916 million in one year. The tax code allows you to reimburse yourself for bad business decisions by deducting a ginormous one-year loss from three years before the loss to 15 years into the future.
I don’t usually share personal stuff with you, but I will admit I haven’t lost $916 million total. Lifetime.
So, we have to give Trump some credit for having the audacity to (a) invest enough in one year to lose $916 million and (b) make the rest of us pay for his mistake.
I took one accounting class in college, so I will not pretend to know any more than I read in Sunday’s papers about how this works. But here’s what I do know: Regular people don’t legally avoid paying federal income taxes for 18 years.
The irony is: This is exactly the kind of thing that has work-a-day Americans so angry. …
For the Trump campaign it doesn’t matter that this billion-dollar-write-off is legal. What it demonstrates is that there is one set of rules for the richest Americans and a completely different set of rules for the rest of us.
For most of us, the only time we think about income taxes is on April 15 when we file our tax forms. Since 1943, when Congress passed the “Current Tax Withholding Act” to provide a constant stream of revenue to pay for World War II, most of us never see the money. …
Unless you are Donald Trump or any one of a small number of mega-developers for whom income taxes are just another piece on their personal financial chessboard to be sacrificed in search of every last penny of personal profit.
It is particularly ironic that in an election with the aforementioned hatred of the 1 percent, we have a pair of 1-percenters who are the major parties’ presidential candidates. Trump earned his money (well, with the help of a “small” loan from his millionaire father), whereas it is remarkable how the Clintons were able to amass an eight-figure fortune out of working in government, isn’t it?
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Trump on Sunday, telling NBC News’ Meet the Press that Trump was a “genius” in business who was simply doing what the tax code allows every American to do by counting losses against tax liabilities, and bouncing back from failure to success.
That would include the New York Times — which, however, is still struggling.
As Jazz Shaw of HotAir.com notes, the Times — or whoever was its source — likely obtained Trump’s tax document illegally.
The ongoing IRS scandal, in which the federal government targeted conservative organizations, involved several cases in which the agency illegally shared taxpayer information with other branches of government, and in one case leaked taxpayer information to a conservative organization’s political opponents.
In 2008, the confidential tax information of Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, who emerged as a critic of then-Sen. Barack Obama, was leaked illegally by an Ohio state official.
It should be pointed out that a business’ not paying taxes because it didn’t make any money in that year is not uncommon. For instance, according to Forbes, The New York Times Co., one of the biggest media companies in the world, paid no corporate income taxes in 2014. Indeed, it has been a longtime tax strategy to use losses in some businesses to offset profits (and therefore corporate income taxes) in other businesses under the same ownership. That too is legal.
Speaking of the Times, the Washington Post reports:
Dean Baquet wasn’t bluffing.
The New York Times executive editor said during a visit to Harvard in September that he would risk jail to publish Donald Trump’s tax returns. He made good on his word Saturday night when the Times published Trump tax documents from 1995, which show the Republican presidential nominee claimed losses of $916 million that year — enough to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years afterward.
Federal law makes it illegal to publish an unauthorized tax return:
It shall be unlawful for any person to whom any return or return information (as defined in section 6103(b)) is disclosed in a manner unauthorized by this title thereafter willfully to print or publish in any manner not provided by law any such return or return information. Any violation of this paragraph shall be a felony punishable by a fine in any amount not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.
Baquet said during a panel discussion at Harvard that if the Times’ lawyers advised him not to publish Trump tax returns, he would argue that such information is vital to the public interest because the real estate mogul’s “whole campaign is built on his success as a businessman and his wealth.” …
The Washington Post’s Justin Wm. Moyer and Lisa Rein recently wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of the kind of defense suggested by Baquet:
First Amendment experts note that while the media could be prosecuted for publishing Trump’s tax returns, a news organization could also assert a First Amendment defense. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, for example, The Post argued that publication served an important public interest.
But those arguments would not be sure winners, experts said. And members of the media would need to consider risks to their sources in any investigation of who shared Trump’s tax information.
“The courts could say, if the public thinks the tax returns are so important, let it demand that the candidate authorize the IRS to release them on pain of losing votes,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a privacy expert and professor at Harvard Law School.
The Times appears not to know who its source is; the tax documents were mailed anonymously. Jack Mitnick, listed as the preparer of Trump’s New Jersey return, verified that document’s authenticity.
Through an attorney, the famously litigious Trump already has threatened “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” against the Times.
Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, who joined Baquet on the Harvard panel and also said he would risk jail to publish Trump’s tax returns, joked during the talk that in the event of a criminal conviction, perhaps everyone in the newsroom could serve one day of the sentence.
Neither Baquet nor anyone else will serve one second of jail time. The thought that the Obama Justice Department would prosecute anyone for illegally obtaining a Republican’s tax records is as ludicrous as assuming that the Milwaukee County district attorney prosecutes murders and gun crimes.
Unfortunately, most voters are not business-savvy enough to grasp the difference between tax avoidance (legally reducing your tax bill, including, yes, to zero) and tax evasion (illegally reducing your tax bills, which gets you a visit from the feds). The Clintons know the difference, as proven by the existence of the Clinton Foundation. Trump reportedly employs 22,000 people, but I’m sure few people will grant him that.
Facebook Friend Gary Probst adds:
Here’s the difference between working in a controlled, safe, no-accountability, socialist government job and being in business.
Any farmer can tell you there are times when they pay no taxes because of losses or investment needs for equipment. Any real estate developer can tell you the same. … It’s called reinvestment and it has to do with building things. This is how the laws are structured, so people in business can survive the onslaught of government regulations and taxation and still have some capital to grow.
The liberals, mostly government workers, will flip out on this. They don’t understand anything but carrying their little brown bag into the office, sitting at a desk, shuffling the same papers, pontificating down to people who take risk in life to try and build things and acting like smug asses when a bureaucratic rule is broken. They produce … nothing. They take … everything.
Do NOT let libs beat up Trump over this. It is legal and designed to help in real estate development, so the nation grows. There are plenty of things to be upset with Trump over. This is not one of them:
Will this hurt Trump on Election Day? I bet it won’t, because the Trump supporters will vote for him under any circumstances, including the legitimate reason of keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House. (However, they will fail.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 