Bryan Riley tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
The idea that foreign capital inflows to the USA represent debt that “we owe” is 2/3 incorrect. And we would be in much worse shape w/out foreign purchases of government debt. The best response is less government borrowing. Not tariffs. Not taxes on foreign investment.
To err once might be human. To err “approximately 42,695 times” is to disregard the law.
A federal judge ruled this week that the Internal Revenue Service violated the law tens of thousands of times last summer when the agency shared confidential taxpayer addresses with the Department of Homeland Security for the purpose of rounding up illegal immigrants.
People illegally in the country won’t pay what they owe the government if they think doing so will lead to their deportation. The breach reflects an irresponsible attitude toward all taxpaying Americans who hand over personal data on the assumption their identifying details will remain private and secure unless important requirements are met.
In her Thursday ruling, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the IRS turned over thousands of addresses despite DHS failing to provide basic details to confirm that specific individuals were being targeted. The law is written to stop private information from getting caught up in such data mining exercises.
Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to declare war. One can debate the extent to which presidents can initiate relatively small-scale military actions, and such debates have raged for decades. But this attack is very obviously large enough to qualify as a war. Thus, it just as obviously requires congressional authorization. And Trump didn’t get any, and indeed did not even try to do so.
Don’t take my word for the proposition that it’s a war. Take Trump’s! He himself has called it a war, and proclaimed that the objective is regime change.
The closest historical analogue is Barack Obama’s 2011 air campaign against Libya, which was also attempt at regime change carried out with air strikes. For those keeping score, I condemned Obama’s action and repeatedly criticized him for violating the Constitution and the War Powers Act (see also here). But Iran is a larger and more powerful nation than Libya, and thus this is likely to be an even bigger conflict. And, as I have said before, Obama’s illegal actions don’t justify Trump’s (and vice versa).
George Will continues to excoriate the monster in charge at the Kremlin. A slice:
A constant of modern Russian history is the systemic stupidity and toadyism that tyranny breeds. In the 1930s, some of Joseph Stalin’s censors, who were more zealous than educated, reportedly (writes Stalin’s biographer Stephen Kotkin) forbade radio broadcasts of music by Franz Schubert, who died in 1828, for fear he might be a supporter of Stalin’s nemesis, Leon Trotsky, who was born in 1879.
Do not expect those who have risen profitably into Putin’s orbit to steer their obsessed benefactor toward what Trump’s National Security Strategy, published in December, calls “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.”
