Friday (12/21/2017) Democrats pillory Tax Cuts bill but fear middle class benefit and economic boom

President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts into law in the Oval Office before departing for Christmas at his Palm Beach, FL home. Investor’s Business Daily writes: “Democrats have gone ballistic, claiming that the GOP’s sweeping tax plan will rob the middle class and the poor, line the pockets of the rich, and tank the economy. It’s all false, class-warfare clap-trap, and they know it….[Democrats have] failed to stop the one thing that might deny them a chance to retake both houses of Congress in the 2018 midterm elections: an economic boom.”

The Wall Street Journal writes that Santa Claus has already been distributing gifts from major corporations to workers in advance of the new tax regime going into effect on January 1st: Boeing $100 mn., AT&T $200 mn., Comcast $100 mn, Fifth Third $3 mn for its hourly workers and a minimum wage raise to $15 an hour. This is in addition to promised new investment, facility improvements, and new job hires.

Australia’s Treasurer fears that “If Australia doesn’t pass its own version of the Trump tax cuts, the country will take a hit to its GDP of up to 1 percent” as the US becomes a more desirable place in which to invest and create jobs.

The new tax bill not only puts pressure on countries like Australia, which presently has a 30% corporate tax, but also “blue” US states which have high local and state taxes that will no longer be fully deductible on individual Federal tax forms. Thus the tax reform that the President has just signed will put an end to the “Blue State Model,” a model of continuous tax hikes to pay for ever more generous salaries and benefits for unionized government-sector workers.

The Resistance

The Resistance consists of the multiple paths that Democrats are employing to sabotage the Trump Presidency and Republican agenda in Congress. One path is bureaucratic resistance. Bloomberg reports that “Washington Bureaucrats Are Quietly Working to Undermine Trump’s Agenda. Across the government, career staffers are finding ways to continue old policies, sometimes just by renaming a project.”

Numerous legal suits are another tactic being  pursued to stymie administration actions, even if they fare poorly in the courts as, for example, the emoluments case in which “a federal judge in New York…just rejected a lawsuit that challenges whether [Trump is] impermissibly benefiting financially from being U.S. president.”

Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s supposed collusion with Russia to throw the presidential election to Trump was to have been The Resistance’s…pièce de résistance. Alas, it backfired so that now The Resistance is hoping that as more and more evidence accumulates of the Obama Administration’s corruption of the Justice Department and FBI, Trump will just fire Mueller and perhaps other top officials in those departments. The Resistance can then go into nationwide insurrection, shouting “obstruction of justice” and “impeachment.”

The Criminal Conspiracy

But meanwhile Trump does nothing of the sort, and the investigations keep uncovering more and more material embarrassing to the leadership of the Justice Department, FBI, Democratic National Committee, the Clinton Campaign, and possibly even President Obama. When the Democrats controlled the executive before January 20, 2017, they could easily suppress these investigations. Now they can just stonewall, and that is precisely what seems to be happening. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe spent seven hours being questioned Wednesday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). He stonewalled every attempt to get him to answer whether a single fact in the Steele dossier, which is at the center of the Mueller investigation, had ever been verified by the FBI.

The HPSCI is now considering subpoenas to force McCabe and other FBI officials to answer the Committees questions. A top senator, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, is calling for McCabe to be replaced as Acting FBI Director.

Politico reports that “House Republicans quietly investigate perceived corruption at DOJ, FBI. The group was born out of frustration over the Justice Department’s refusal to explain how it used a disputed dossier.”

Former British intelligence officer Steele, supposedly the author of the disputed Steele dossier, is himself now reluctant to say that his dossier links Trump to the Russians.

The complex background behind Steele’s dossier — as basically political opposition research not reliable intelligence and probably not even by Steele but just embellished by him — is usefully narrated here.

There are personnel cross-links between the Mueller investigation based on the dubious Steele dossier and another scandal involving top Democrats: the  Imran Awan case. Awan was the information technology chief for then Democratic National Committee chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Schulz. Awan was arrested for bank fraud when he was about to flee the US for Pakistan. His brother ran a phony used-car lot that was used to launder money for Hezbollah and its terrorist activities. The Obama administration suppressed a DEA investigation of Hezbollah’s activities so as to not jeopardize its all-out efforts to achieve a nuclear pact with Iran.

Bruce Ohr headed the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces that would have been involved in investigating Hezbollah’s cocaine-running activity. He and his wife Nellie Ohr were also deeply involved in the development of the Steele dossier.

If the Democrats seize either or both Houses in next November’s elections, these investigations will be squashed and an attempt to oust Trump will be initiated.

hat tips: Eaglebeak, Nicomachus

Click here to go to yesterday’s Founders Broadsheet in case you missed it (“Should too-powerful Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft be broken up or regulated?”)