In Kelo, the court further diluted the concept of “public use,” making it mean “public benefit.” The court upheld (5-4) the New London (Connecticut) Development Corp.’s condemnation of a not-at-all-blighted blue-collar neighborhood so some unknown bigger taxpayer might benefit. After the condemnation, the Pfizer pharmaceutical corporation proposed, for a while, building a research facility where feral cats now roam.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, dissenting with William H. Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, presciently warned that the consequences of the decision “will not be random.” Affluent, articulate, well-lawyered factions would prey upon vulnerable, less sophisticated people.
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The Kelo decision that diluted property rights was denounced by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. It was, however, celebrated by — speaking of the predictable — a developer who, like others of his ilk, sees moneymaking opportunities in collaborations with rapacious governments empowered to expropriate the property of less isolated, not-well-connected individuals. Said Donald Trump of Kelo: “I happen to agree with it 100 percent.”
Kevin Gentry talks about the U.S. economy with Phil Gramm.
It’s a common, politically fueled mistake to talk about cutting taxes without also talking about our fiscal situation. We’re $37 trillion in debt — going on $59 trillion in a decade — and after years of alarming growth, the annual spending deficit is roughly $2 trillion. We also must grapple with the looming entitlement crisis, and interest payments on government debt are the fastest-growing budget item. Times are changing, making fiscal responsibility more crucial than ever.
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A new Hoover Institution study reveals that businesses are more responsive to corporate tax changes than previously thought. Analyzing the 2017 cuts, Kevin Hassett (the National Economic Council’s new director), Jon Hartley and Josh Rauh found that a one-percentage-point reduction in the cost of capital can boost investment rates by up to 2.4%, surpassing earlier estimates.
Congress should hence prioritize making full expensing of capital investment permanent. It could also extend it to investments in structures.
Similarly, the cuts to individuals’ tax rates should be made permanent. This provision encourages work, savings and investments, especially for high earners, fostering a more dynamic and resilient economy. Recent research by Rauh and Ryan Shyu on California tax increases shows how much more sensitive high-income filers are to rate changes than most research generally assumes. The economists looked at taxpayers’ responses after Proposition 30 increased marginal tax rates by up to three percentage points for high-income households. An extra 0.8% of these taxpayers left the state as a result, and those who stayed reduced taxable income, eroding up to 61% of expected revenue within two years. This sensitivity to high tax rates and our progressive federal tax code mean that letting individual tax cuts expire will have a bigger impact than projected, and extending them will have a smaller deficit impact than most fear.
Phil Magness writes sensibly at his Facebook page:
Jonah Goldberg is more hawkish than I am. But he has pinpointed the problem with the Trump-aligned faction of the “Realist” foreign policy scene, and especially JD Vance.
We are not getting principled “restraint” from this crowd, as they endlessly promised us for the past 4 years. We are getting make-it-up-as-you-go rationalizations for all sorts of foreign policy belligerence, expansionist territorial agendas, incoherent tariff crusades, selective dictator-coddling, and self-serving exceptions to the “peace” they previously touted.
None of this is surprising if you’ve followed Vance’s political career or, more importantly, the many “foreign policy expert” courtiers who have groveled their way into Trump’s orbit as a way of pursuing their pet interventionist projects.
Also writing sensibly at his Facebook page is Mark Pennington:
It may well be that there is nothing either Europe or the US can do to secure victory for Ukraine. What is sickening about the Trumpian approach to this though is the evident admiration that the US administration has for Putin and some of his methods. I agreed with most of what JD Vance said last week about the lack of commitment to freedom in Europe, and the UK specifically. The problem is, you cannot take this message seriously from an administration that admires bullies. The sad truth is that freedom is under threat from the censorious leftists who govern many European states – even if they are not actually ‘in government’ – and from this new generation of ‘conservatives’ in the US – and perhaps in the years to come in Britain too – who are a total embarrassment to Ronald Reagan and Mrs. T. It isn’t the 1930s, but it’s grim nonetheless.
George Will warns of the west’s active coddling of the Russian monster Putin. A slice:
Last week in Munich, a city closer to Ukraine than Washington is to Atlanta, Vice President JD Vance told Europeans that the principal security threat they face is insufficient free speech, exemplified particularly by the refusal of other German political parties to govern in coalition with Alternative for Germany, a fascist-adjacent party sympathetic to Ukraine’s would-be executioner, Vladimir Putin.
Vance spoke two days after President Donald Trump’s 90-minute phone conversation with Putin. The day of that call, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared it “unrealistic” to hope for peace negotiations through which Ukraine regains pre-2014 territories (before Russia’s seizure of Crimea) or gains NATO membership. Perhaps those two outcomes are unattainable. But Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s former prime minister and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, tartly questioned the realism of giving the Russians “everything that they want even before the negotiations have been started.”
