Tax Reform – Page 3

The art of the possible

By Norman Zanetti

Democrats and their media cheerleaders are doubling down on stupid. They continue to marginalize everything President Donald Trump and Republicans have engineered. This should prompt another major belly-smacker in this year’s mid-term elections.

Following years of dreary regulatory and anti-business agendas, we now have a template for sustainable growth. The art of the possible has moved the needle from red to green.

Restoration comes with a price in this hyper-partisan environment. The positive intermediate and long-term effects make worthwhile tolerating some short-term pain and risk. Hosts of politically shallow intellectuals on CNN, MSNBC, and in the mainstream press, now fear the signature issues that elected Trump, and majorities in both houses, will prevail over their progressive psychosis about Trump’s fitness for office.

Particularly daunting is the growing credence of media suppressing evidence that a host of illegalities were perpetrated by members of the Obama administration to undermine then-candidate Trump. Among them were FISA warrants under false pretense for broad surveillance; leaks from then-FBI Director James Comey; his exoneration of Hillary Clinton prior to her Congressional testimony; and those contributions to the Clinton Foundation. I foresee a lot more powder keg revelations still to come.

Despite the perpetual state of indignation toward President Trump by the New York Times and Washington Post, along with special counsel Robert Mueller’s attempts to criminalize civil matters, voting by the left is unlikely to unleash a so-called “blue wave” come November. What will continue to drive motivated Republican and independent voting is boarder control reform, tax reform, regulatory reform, military upgrades, and addressing trade imbalances. And don’t forget wage growth, which will benefit a swath of Americans next tax season.

My question as to the media’s endless false narrative known as Russian collusion is: Why would Russians have wanted Trump to win? He was a political unknown. Plus, the Russians got away with so much during the Obama-Clinton years, why would they not have longed for a “third Obama term” (President Clinton)? The Russians feast on weakness. During Obama’s reign, the entire Mideast fell apart, causing mass migration and genocide. Nothing was done to address North Korea, or continued civil unrest in Africa. They had to know Trump was, at the very least, unpredictable. Why then do anything to help his chances?

Norman Zanetti is a frequent contributor and local political observer. This essay originated as a letter to New York Times op-ed columnist David Leonhardt. We salute Mr. Zanetti for having the mental fortitude to endure perusal of the Times.

Trumping a socialist wave

By Norman Zanetti

The radical leanings of the likes of U.S. House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a host of others calling for Democratic Socialism, are a rapidly growing segment within the Democratic Party. They are stretching their party’s interests from health care for all, for free college tuition, ending capitalism, nationalizing major industries and their profits, all part and parcel to driving wealth redistribution within America.

Their attempts to create what amounts to a cradle-to-grave social structure along with other left wing ideological whims represents an invariant agenda, mocking the dynamism of decades of dedication to personal innovation and risk taking. These grew America’s wealth and stature, rewarding personal success, and supporting programs for its citizens by way of their tax contributions going forward. This made America a prosperous republic and the envy of the world.

The progressive preoccupation to woo voters to shifting all social costs to government entities versus the private sector only defers the inevitable — chaos, confusion, resentment, infighting, probability of hyperinflation, and a much higher tax rate for business and personal entities to support it. This is being assisted in part by a burgeoning social media that is now being scrutinized. There is no airbrushing this astonishingly expensive and strategically incoherent strategy.

Is there enough gullibility in the American voting public for this to resonate in political favor, to gain traction for a blue wave in this November’s mid-term elections? Don’t think so. The 63 million-plus who voted for President Donald Trump, as well as a growing independent base, will reject the cacophony of voices of those supporting socialism more broadly. The art of the possible is on full display. The ambitious agenda to Make America Great Again is succeeding, and all under the radar of a media network which has purposely refrained from acknowledging a booming economy and renewed consumer confidence. Group loathing by the entire progressive establishment will not point the November mid-term needle to a blue wave.

President Trump is unburdened with how the major media and progressives are challenging his agenda. He knows and we know they are afraid to admit to any and all positive enhancements his agenda has accomplished. It can’t be hidden from us despite splenetic attacks on his person.

Trump rising

The Trump Era meltdown among far left, water carrying members of a once proud profession called journalism has arrived at a critical juncture. They have transformed years long chaos along the United States’ southern border into a humanitarian crisis — perpetuated, they shriek, by a President who believes in enforcing immigration laws already on the books. The nerve!

Sadly, these media drama makers know well that few average citizens have been aware of the hell facing border security officials for many years, dating to the Bush 43 and Obama administrations. It’s more complicated than ever now, with the border runners having been joined by upturns in “families” falsely seeking asylum and child traffickers.

The left has ginned this up because it was running out of fake narratives, and because more Americans have begun to understand that Trump means what he says and gets results. And as his Great Red Tsunami builds toward the fall mid-terms, it not only threatens the presumption of a Blue Wave but simultaneously diminishes Obama’s legacy.

In fact, the June Limbaugh Letter quotes none other than New York magazine observing, “Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed”. Writes Limbaugh, under the headline, Obama’s Vanishing Legacy:

“Amazing what a year and a half under confident, unapologetically pro-American leadership can do to set things right. The impulse to bow has been expunged. No more ‘leading from behind,’ ‘strategic patience,’ or ‘strategic restraint’ on the battlefield. ISIS is being obliterated. Appeasement has been replaced by strength abroad, prosperity at home.”

But the media’s despair is not limited to Obama’s failure ultimately to transform (undo) our nation. The momentum of Trump’s presidency is adding converts, and that’s really finding many talking pro-left heads ready to detonate.

Writes Mark Alexander, editor of The Patriot Post ( https://patriotpost.us/subscribe), a conservative digital digest, “Some of my politically astute friends, who have always been economic conservatives but political moderates, have gone through something of a metamorphosis.” Turns out, even more surprisingly, it’s not merely a reaction to tax cuts and deregulation.

“My friend explained his newfound enthusiasm for Trump in this context: ‘He dropped a bomb on Washington. He dropped a bomb on the status quo in Congress and its special interests. He dropped a bomb on the regulatory behemoths and their bureaucratic bottlenecks. He dropped a bomb on the trade and national security institutions and alliances that have failed miserably over the last eight years’.”

Alexander further notes that there is “a gradual realization percolating to the surface that, despite the grossly biased caricature of Trump projected by the (mainstream media), and too often corroborated by Trump’s social media handlers, this president might be a lot smarter than the buffoon the Leftmedia insists he is.” In fact, Trump is quite comfortable in his own intellectual skin, and said as much to an adoring rally in Duluth, Minn., earlier in the week.

So as for the critical juncture facing this unhinged Leftmedia, what lies beyond it? We might have seen a preview courtesy of Time magazine’s current cover. It features a manufactured (false, in other words) image of a towering Trump glaring down stoically at a now viral photo of a sobbing toddler. (In the original, un-doctored photo she is accompanied by a mother seeking asylum from Honduras).

Perhaps the sobbing girl is less emblematic of an immigration crisis and more symbolic of what the media has become. Diminished, fully melted down and dwarfed by Trump.

Why Trump prevails

While the corrupt corporate media work overtime to convince average Americans that President Donald Trump is fanning the flames of trade wars destined to cripple the economy, Trump merely sticks to his guns, doing what he said he would do as a candidate.

He also said he would consider meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The media, Democrats (and many Republicans) dismissed that as pure folly. North Korea, with shadow support from China, was hell bent on becoming a nuclear threat and would never consent to talks, the experts said. Trump knows nothing about conducting delicate foreign policy, especially with North Korea, they said.

Coming out of the recent G-7 summit, the media had company issuing dire forecasts in the form of shell-shocked political leaders, most notably the petulant Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau, who expressly disparaged Trump’s stances as “insulting”. Trudeau apparently thought he was attending nothing more than a photo-op while Trump arrived for a showdown.

In a matter of days, the Trump administration has reshaped history. It is dismantling obsolete, unfair trade that heretofore U.S. Presidents and politicians have ignored, even to the detriment of the country, because they feared retaliatory tariffs. Trump does not understand why the United States should approach trade from a position of fear or weakness.

In Singapore, Trump made clear he does not understand why the United States would stand by and allow North Korea to pursue nuclear ambitions that threaten citizens of many countries, including our own. Again, he rejected fear and weakness; fear that North Korea would use a high profile summit to legitimize Kim; weakness in failing previously to have directly threatened North Korea with devastating military strikes.

These developments, already widely derided by the U.S. media and the Left, underscore what some observers always expected out of a Trump presidency. We recently re-visited a salient piece of writing by conservative author and political comedian Evan Sayet, who nearly a year ago in July 2017 expressed why Trump’s unconventional, some would say unrefined and undignified, approach to being president would succeed.

“While (Republicans) were playing by the rules of dignity (George W. Bush), collegiality (John McCain) and propriety (Mitt Romney), the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of (Socialist godfather) Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob (that gave us Barack Obama).”

As Democrats in Washington, in state houses and in the courts, have moved further left, Republicans rarely groomed candidates to take them on. There are exceptions such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, but they did not become President. Trump did, warts, Twitter rants, ego, and all.

Sayet in his explanation of the Trump phenomenon, and why he emerged at precisely the right moment in history, recalls the dilemma facing President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War when his lead warrior was the notoriously hard drinking, rough-around-the-edges General Ulysses Grant. Lincoln concluded, despite Grant’s critics, that, “I can not spare this man. He fights.”

Some rightly note our nation has entered a civil cold war pitting a bicoastal Left that wants to remake America by dismantling the Constitution against a Right-leaning populace still convinced of America’s exceptionalism. If we’re not on the brink of civil war, we are nonetheless in the midst of a culture war. Concludes Sayet (writing months before tax reform, trade showdowns and engagement with North Korea):

“Do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be ‘collegial’ and ‘dignified’ and ‘proper’? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

“So say anything you want about (Trump) — I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.”

The war on Trump rages on

By Norman Zanetti

Recently, sitting on my front porch, I watched a breeze blow the Stars and Stripes to a beautiful horizontal. A short time later, a thought occurred to me — a scary “what if.”

What if an incredibly malleable electorate were to succumb to a systematic gutting of confidence in Republican initiatives and their leaders, especially an elected president?

The media continues to camouflage the benefits of tax relief, sensible border control with proper vetting, sanctions on terroristic regimes, job gains, reduction in the number of Americans on food stamps, the lowest unemployment rates for minorities, and renewed confidence in our economy by every consumer index that reports it.

The scariest contingency to contemplate is that Americans are taking all these muddling allegations of nefarious behavior without questioning where they come from and why. Those leaning to the ideological left are betting on American complacency.

The truth forthcoming will destroy mountains of lies. Skeptics are surfacing and reaching out to listeners.

They are working overtime to expose the chicanery and mudslinging against an elected administration, an administration dealing with North Korea, Russian provocations and trade imbalances — all while delivering on programs that got candidate Trump elected.

Prosecutorial overreach by implication has worn thin, and Americans sense it. It is being questioned and reversed by skeptics.

The mandarins in Congress and heads of news organizations will soon have to accommodate these new revelations being unearthed or lose total creditably.

If that comes too late, I can see our proud flag bellowing in the wind with teardrops and drooping in fatigue.

Remain a sophisticated skeptic in your own right. Americans voted in the millions for Trump. Not a single vote was cast for media heads who despise him, or prosecutors hell-bent on destroying him.

Norman Zanetti is a contributor to ResolveNC.blog.