I am tired of reading that the proposed tax cuts will mostly benefit the rich.   Yes, they will. The tax cuts can’t benefit the poor because they don’t pay taxes. Any meaningful tax cut has to benefit the rich.

The top 1 percent of income earners in the US pay 38 percent of the taxes; the top 10 percent pay 70 percent of the taxes.

If the goal of a tax cut is to put more money back into the private sector then the rich have to get a significant tax cut.

If taxes were completely eliminated for 90 percent of the population, that would only cut revenue by 30 percent.

The other thing that the mainstream media ignore is that the rich pay the taxes they agree to pay. They aren’t filling out the EZ form and taking the standard deduction. They have teams of accountants and lawyers figuring out how they can pay less in taxes. There are ways for rich people to reduce their taxes that aren’t available to the rest of us.

The rich also have far more control over their income than the middle class. They don’t simply get a paycheck with all the deductions taken out; they have all kinds of deferred payments, stock options and the like that allow them to pay less in taxes.

*****

Special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s whole investigation appears to be based on a fake document paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It is absurd that the Republicans are allowing the investigation to continue.

If the investigation is based on a lie, how can anything come out of it except more lies?

What Mueller should be investigating is the Hillary Clinton campaign and how it came to be paying high-level Kremlin operatives to provide rumors and gossip about Donald Trump. Isn’t that collusion with the Russians? If paying Russians for information isn’t collusion, what is?

The other thing that needs to be investigated is whether or not the FBI relied on the Trump dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, to get Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to listen in on communications at the Trump Tower. If the FBI did, then some folks need to go to jail, because even a rookie FBI agent should be able to recognize that the dossier written by Christopher Steele was mostly made up garbage. You don’t have to check every allegation in the dossier to know that much of it isn’t true.

The Clinton people had been shopping it around to major media outlets for weeks and none of them would touch it because it wasn’t sourced. It largely amounts to a little truth mixed in with a lot of lies about Trump. If the major media knew that it was false, then how could the FBI put any credence in it? Why didn’t the FBI throw the thing in the trash can like the newspapers did?

There is no doubt that both The Washington Post and The New York Times hoped and prayed that every word was true, but even they had journalistic ethics that wouldn’t allow them to use a document they knew was mostly false.

*****

It’s hard to believe what is going on it Washington with unproven allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Sen. John McCain said, “The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.”

So according to McCain, if someone makes allegations against a public figure, that public figure should immediately step down, whether there is any truth to the allegations or not?

So if some woman calls a press conference and says that McCain raped her in 1980, then McCain should resign from the Senate even if McCain can prove that the two were never in the same state at the same time and the woman had not mentioned this event in the past 37 years?

Anyone can make an allegation. It doesn’t mean the allegation is true.

Sen. Rob Portman said, “I think if what we read is true, and people are on the record so I assume it is.” It is hard to believe that anyone that naive could get elected to the Senate.

Simply because someone says something “on the record” means that it is true? Where has Portman been all of his life? Politicians lie on the record pretty much constantly.

President Barack Obama said on the record that Obamacare would lower the cost for health insurance. He said people could keep their doctors and their insurance plan. All of those must be true because he said them on the record.

President Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” That must be absolutely true because Bill Clinton said it on the record, which does make you wonder why Bill Clinton was impeached and also how in the world that stain got on the blue dress.

What about Juanita Broaddrick, who said on the record that Bill Clinton raped her? That has to be true because she said it on the record, so why hasn’t Bill Clinton been charged with that crime? Oops, maybe it’s because Bill Clinton said on the record that it wasn’t true.

I have no idea whether the woman accusing Moore of making improper sexual advances toward her when she was a teenager are true or not. But Moore has said on the record that they are not true.

*****

It appears the Democrats are saying the same thing about this tax reform that they said about the Republican tax reform in North Carolina.

The tax reform in North Carolina – according to projections by the Democrats – was going to put North Carolina deeply in debt. According to the Democrats, if the state lowers the tax rates, the state receives less revenue.

The Republicans said that the tax rate would be lowered but it would stimulate the economy, so more people and corporations would be paying the lower rate and it would result in more income, not less.

It turned out the Republicans were right and the Democrats were wrong. North Carolina is not in more debt since the tax cuts, but has paid off the debt that the Democrats ran up with high taxes.

In fact, one of the reasons Gov. Roy Cooper gave for vetoing the budget was that in his opinion the budget placed too much of the excess revenue in a rainy day fund when the money should have been spent.

It worked in North Carolina and it worked for President Ronald Reagan; there is no reason to think that it won’t work for the US again.

One of the problems the Republicans in Congress face is that the staff that works for Congress in areas like the Government Accounting Office are largely Democrats, or at least liberals. They interpret bills the way the Democrats do.

Similar to the problems Trump is having in the White House, where he kept far too much of the staff hired by Obama, the Republicans in Congress have kept far too much staff hired by the Democrats.

Because they are federal government employees they cannot be fired, but they can be transferred. The Republicans need to transfer the Democrats out of key positions in the government and replace them with Republicans.

According to the Democratic theory of taxation, if you want more money the only way to get it is to raise taxes. If the Democrats owned a store, nothing would ever be put on sale because lowering the price simply means less revenue. In fact, those who are involved in retail business know that a sale is often the best way to raise revenue. You make less profit per item, but you sell a lot more items. So what you lose in price you gain in quantity.

The federal tax reform should work the same way, boosting the economy so that, while taxes are lower, more income is being taxed, so more money comes in to the government coffers.

*****

Having said that, I also think the tax reform is heading in the wrong direction.

Rather than take more people off the tax roles – as the current tax cuts do by doubling the personal and family exemptions – it would be far better for the future of the nation to get more people on the tax rolls.

Why shouldn’t everyone with income pay a portion of that income in taxes? People don’t get an exemption from sales tax or property tax, why get an exemption from income tax?

If more people paid income tax more people would be concerned about the outrageous spending the goes on in Washington, DC. A whole lot of people don’t give a hoot about the excessive spending because it doesn’t cost them a dime. They see government programs as free giveaways because it is free for them. If more people paid federal taxes they would be more likely to understand that there is no free lunch.

 

Republican politicians are being accused of groping women right and left. But the mainstream media, for some reason, is ignoring the former vice groper in chief – and there are at plenty of videos of him groping women: That would be former Vice President Joe Biden.

During photo ops and swearing in ceremonies, Biden could not keep his hands off women. And from the expressions on the faces of some of these women, you can tell that the groping was not appreciated.

It seems according to the mainstream media that it’s OK for Biden to grope women because he is a Democrat.

*****

It should be no surprise that Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore should step down because of the allegations of sexual impropriety 40-some years ago.

McConnell did everything in his power to keep Moore from being the Republican nominee. McConnell put millions of dollars into the campaign of Sen. Luther Strange, who had been appointed to serve until an election could be held. McConnell lost that battle.

Moore represents everything McConnell doesn’t want in the Senate – an independent conservative who is going to align with Trump and not McConnell.

McConnell is as much as saying that he would rather have a Democrat from Alabama than a Trump Republican, which says much more about McConnell than it does about Moore. It is also just one more reason that McConnell should be ousted as majority leader.

McConnell doesn’t give any reason for believing the woman who waited 40 years before coming forward to say that Moore acted inappropriately with her when she was 14. Moore says it never happened and she says that it did.

If McConnell has some good reason for believing her other than the fact that – other than the women who accused Bill Clinton of everything including rape – the women should always be believed and the men should always be assumed to be lying, he needs to tell the American people what it is.

My experience is that men lie and women lie. I haven’t seen in my life any indication that one sex is more honest than the other.

*****

Most of the time news photographers have to stand around hoping something noteworthy will happen. At meetings with a head of state, the best they can usually hope for is an awkward handshake.

However, at these world summits, the photographers appear to be getting their revenge. First they started getting all the attendees to put on some unusual piece of clothing. Now they have progressed to weird handholding sessions.

I predict that at the next summit the world leaders will form a human pyramid like cheerleaders.

*****

It would be nice to think that the tax reform plans making their way through the House and Senate would reform taxes, but the longer this goes on and the longer representatives and senators have to mess around with it, the less chance there is that the plan will be any more than an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.

One of the keys is to reduce corporate taxes. Corporations don’t pay taxes, they simply pass the tax bill on down the line – higher prices, lower pay, whatever it takes to keep profits up. But the Senate version delays the corporate tax cut to 2019. If the corporate tax cut to 20 percent is going to spur the economy, why wait? If it isn’t going to spur the economy, why cut corporate taxes.

The Senate version also keeps all seven tax brackets – so much for simplifying taxes.

The Republicans absolutely have to pass something and it appears the attitude on Capitol Hill is it doesn’t matter if it is actually an improvement as long as it’s different; then they can claim victory and go home for Christmas.

Maybe the tax reform bill will be like a Christmas movie, where everything goes wrong and then, right before Christmas, it starts snowing and all the problems of the tax code are worked out by some clerk deep in the bowels of the Capitol Building who just wants to get finished in time to see his family at Christmas.

It could happen.

*****

Here is one problem with expecting gun control laws to stop mass killings like the recent shooting in Texas. The people who shoot other people have already decided to break a law far more severe than any gun control law will ever be. The fact that they have to break a gun control law in order to obtain the gun to kill people is not going to stop them.

The people in this country currently possess over 300 million guns. The guns aren’t going away even if the government tried to confiscate them.

Most everyone agrees with background checks, and if the US Air Force had followed the law and filed the proper reports on Devin Kelley when he was dishonorably discharged, he would not have been able to buy a gun.

The shooter in Newtown, Connecticut, couldn’t buy a gun so he took his mother’s.

You have the same problem with street violence. Most of the people shooting each other in the streets are not in legal possession of those guns. Much of the time they have already been convicted of a felony and lost their right to own a gun.

People don’t like to hear it, but gun control laws will simply take the guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.

In Texas, if a law-abiding citizen with a gun had not run toward the sound of gunshots in the church, there is no telling how many more people might have been killed.

It’s hard to argue that Stephen Willeford, who shot and killed Kelley, shouldn’t have a gun, but former Vice President Joe Biden is arguing just that. If someone in the church had been armed, many more lives might have been saved.

*****

One aspect of the whole special prosecutor-Trump dossier-Clinton campaign utterly confusing melodrama that has had me confused is why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would recommend that Trump fire FBI Director Jim Comey.

It didn’t make sense because Rosenstein is obviously anti-Trump and pro Obama-Clinton-Comey-Mueller. But now that the whole charade is falling apart it makes perfect sense.

Rosenstein recommended firing Comey so that he could hire special prosecutor Bob Mueller to investigate Trump. Who knows, Rosenstein may have even told Comey what he was doing beforehand and Comey may have agreed that for the good of the nation, to get Trump out of the White House, he was willing to take the hit.

It’s an explanation about the entire special prosecutor to investigate the Trump dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign that seems to make sense.

Unfortunately, what Trump has to do now is get rid of Rosenstein and the special prosecutor. He should make Attorney General Jeff Sessions do the dirty work because if Sessions had behaved as he should have and not recused himself, this absurd investigation would have never reached this point.

It will certainly cost Sessions in the media, but he deserves it for not standing up in the first place. Then Trump can fire Sessions for firing Mueller and hire an attorney general who has his best interests at heart.

Sessions is doubly responsible for the special prosecutor: one, for recusing himself for no good reason, and two, for turning the issue over to Rosenstein. How can Mueller investigate anything that has to do with Comey when he is Comey’s mentor and close personal friend?

Once the special prosecutor is gone, someone – and it can’t be the FBI, which is involved up to their ears in the whole mess – needs to get to the bottom of the Steele-Trump dossier-Clinton campaign collusion mess.

Then they need a special prosecutor to investigate the Uranium One-Fusion GPS-Clinton Foundation scandal because the FBI fouled that one up also.

In the end, Mueller, Comey and Rosenstein may be the ones being investigated.

In the Russian uranium sale, they already have everything except Hillary Clinton on tape saying that if the Russians will pay her husband $500,000 in small bills and donate $100 million in untraceable funds to the Clinton Foundation then she will make sure the uranium sale goes through.

They will likely never find that tape, or maybe Steele, the author of the Trump dossier, can produce one for the right amount of money. In it, Hillary may have a slight Russian accent and use odd word choices, but certainly at this point no one would doubt that Steele’s work is above reproach. For the right price he could probably prove that President John Kennedy was shot by Donald Trump Jr., despite the fact that Trump Jr. wasn’t alive at the time.

If there were any doubt of where Session’s loyalties lie these days, just look at his refusal to investigate Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

When you see what Trump has already accomplished as far as the US economy goes, despite all the distractions of a special prosecutor, it is an incredible accomplishment.

*****

The mainstream media have tied itself in knots in an attempt to prove that because Virginia elected a Democratic governor, Trump is losing his base.

Of course, what the mainstream media conveniently ignore is that Virginia was the only Southern state that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. So a state that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 elects a Democratic governor in 2017 and that is supposed to prove that Trump has lost his influence.

What if proves is that the people who were for Hillary Clinton and opposed to Trump are still opposed to Trump. Why this is big news is a mystery that only someone with the mindset of a Hillary Clinton-lover could explain.

The news from that race was not that the Democrat won but that the race was ever competitive. Plus, it’s hard to see how it can reflect poorly on Trump because Ed Gillespie did everything he could to distance himself from Trump. It turned out not to be a winning strategy. If Gillespie got a do over, I imagine he would have Trump campaigning with him at every opportunity.

The Republican Party without Trump doesn’t seem to be able to elect a dogcatcher. If you were a Republican running for office, who would you rather have come to help you rally support – Trump or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?

If you have Trump, people will stand in the rain for hours for him. In the case of McConnell, if you give away free beer you might be able to attract a crowd, but the crowd McConnell would attract on his own is likely to be filled with Republicans who have come simply to yell at McConnell to do something.

One lesson from Gillespie’s loss is that the Republican base doesn’t like fence sitter-moderates. Gillespie should have looked to his south for a moment and noted what happened to North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory. In 2016, a year when Republicans won practically everything in the state, McCrory managed to lose his bid to be reelected.

McCrory was neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat; he was more liberal than the North Carolina General Assembly and vetoed bills passed by the Republican majorities in the legislature. The legislature let McCrory know who is in charge in North Carolina, and it’s not the governor. They simply overrode his vetoes. Vetoing Republican bills and then having those vetoes overridden by the Republican legislature was McCrory doubling down on bad political decisions.

Vetoing a bill passed by your own party when the legislature clearly has the votes and the will to override your veto is simply a dumb move politically.

McCrory tried to line up to the left of the General Assembly and to the right of his opponent Roy Cooper. It turns out there weren’t enough votes in that small slice of the electorate to reelect McCrory.

Gillespie tried a similar tactic in Virginia, where he refused to align himself with Trump but tried to win over Trump supporters by backing many Trump policies.

Wishy-washy is usually not a winning political stance.

*****

It certainly appears that Steve Bannon’s plan to rid Congress of moderate Republicans is working. Bannon said he would run conservative candidates against the current crowd in Washington, and every week more of those Republican establishment types are deciding that they don’t want to face the possibility of a primary against a well-funded conservative and are announcing their retirement.

Of course, considering the lucrative retirement benefits that Congress gives itself, it’s a wonder any of them serve more than a couple of terms. If you get elected to Congress a couple of times, you get paid for the rest of your life. Show me a job in the private sector or even in government with anything close to the retirement benefits of Congress.

The late 6th District Congressman Howard Coble thought the retirement plan for Congress was so outrageous he refused to participate in it. But as far as I know he is the only member of Congress who had the courage of his own convictions.

Most of the folks – Democrats and Republicans – in Congress look out for themselves and their reelection first, which means great benefits for Congress and sending piles of money home to their constituents. The good of the country is a distant third.

*****

Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore has been trashed by practically everyone. The Democrats, as one would expect, have been joined by the establishment Republicans in launching an all-out attack on Moore.

The good news is that we have a system of government in this nation where the people get to decide about their candidates. The voters of Alabama, who know Moore far better than any of the folks at The Washington Post or any of the Republican establishment types, get to decide whether Moore is telling the truth or the women who are accusing him of sexual misconduct are telling the truth, or if the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

The women who have come forward have made some serious allegations about Moore, but Moore says that they aren’t true. It all depends on who you believe.

If allegations made by women against men are always true than Bill Clinton is a rapist.

Despite the fact that the allegation that she was raped by Bill Clinton made by Juanita Broaderick were detailed and she reportedly told friends about it at the time, she was not to be believed.

Kathleen Willy gave a detailed account of being attacked by Bill Clinton in the White House but the media and the Washington establishment decided she was lying.

Paula Corbin Jones gave a detailed account of Bill Clinton exposing himself to her in a hotel room, but she was labeled as “trailer trash” and therefore a liar.

One of the allegations against Moore that is supposed to be proof he dated a 14-year-old and attacked a 16-year-old is that he flirted with young women who worked at the mall. Another is that he took an 18- or 19-year-old woman to dinner several times.

These are both frequently listed as proof that he assaulted a 16-year-old and took a 14-year-old woman to his home where he partially disrobed her. But flirting with women and taking an 18- or 19-year-old to dinner are not proof of any misbehavior.

Does flirting with young women or taking an 18- or 19-year-old woman to dinner disqualify a man for serving in the US Senate?

Fortunately, the voters of Alabama are the ones who get to decide. If they believe Moore, who denies the allegations, then he’ll probably win.

Then there is also the possibility that people won’t make a determination about who is telling the truth but will vote for Moore based on his politics. A lot of people believe all politicians are scumbags and the only difference between them is that some have their misbehavior made public and others don’t.

*****

Here is another thought about the Republican establishment that is purely political, but may explain the reaction of McConnell and others to the allegations against Moore.

McConnell doesn’t like being in the majority because as the majority leader he is expected to be able to pass legislation – something he has been unable to do. If Moore loses then the Republican majority drops to 51-49 and gives him an even better excuse for not being able to do anything as Senate majority leader.

It appears that McConnell would like it even better if the Democrats had a 51-49 majority because then he wouldn’t be expected to do anything except complain, and McConnell is a master at complaining.

It sounds crazy to say that the Senate majority leader would want to become the Senate minority leader, but being in the minority is far easier than being in the majority. Being in the minority you aren’t expected to do anything and McConnell appears to be very good at that.

*****

It’s kind of sad; all Obama wanted was to be liked and respected. He thought the way to achieve that was to bow to foreign leaders and be obsequious. Foreign leaders showed Obama no respect.

Trump doesn’t bow to anyone and has accused China of currency manipulation, unfair trade practices and violating international law in the South China Seal, yet for Trump, China rolled out the red carpet.

Most people don’t find groveling appealing. Some sick people do, but most people prefer someone who will stand up and say what they think rather than praise them in public and condemn them in private whispers.

Trump has respect because he says what he thinks. Some leaders don’t like it, but they will get over it.