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◆ Republican Tax Plan: The Essential Features
The details still need to be worked out through negotiations.
It is a 9-page framework at this stage, more detailed than previous releases but still not a fleshed-out bill.
Key features:
Lower corporate tax rates: Nominal rates cut significantly–to 20%
- Whether actual rates for Company X or Company Y are lowered depend on whether previous deductions are eliminated.
- Fewer personal brackets
- Much bigger standard deduction for each individual or family
- Big benefit to lower-income earners
- Many fewer deductions
- Keeps big deductions for mortgages, charity, and medical
- Repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax,
- Initially meant for a few rich individuals but now affects millions of taxpayers
- Eliminates the Estate Tax (“death tax”)
- Repeals deduction for state and local taxes (very contentious)
- Keeps a special carve-out for hedge fund called “carried interest” (very contentious)
◆ The Essential Politics
First, the goal is growth, even if it raises projected budget deficits.
Second, everybody is making hypocritical arguments.
- The Democrats doubled the country’s debt over the Obama Administration. Now, they are complaining about deficits.
- The Republicans screamed about debt and deficits during the Obama Administration. Now, most of them say deficits are less important than growth
Third, the main political arguments are conventional and obvious for both sides.
- Democrats: “This will only help the rich” (redistribution argument)”
- Republicans: “Everybody wins when the economy grows faster” (growth argument)
The New York Times weights in reliably with this analysis headline: Trump Tax Plan Benefits Wealthy, Including Trump. Most analysts agree with this regressive-distribution effect, at least in the initial proposal.
◆ Big Court Threat to Public Employee Unions (USA Today)
The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to hear a challenge to the so-called “fair share” fees public employee unions collect from non-members, posing a major threat to organized labor.
Unlike the past three times the court has considered similar cases, its five-member conservative majority appears poised to rule that workers opposed to union representation cannot be forced to pay for collective bargaining and other benefits. –USA Today
Comment: The Republicans really want to weaken the public unions, as Scott Walker’s campaign in Wisconsin showed.
The unions know it and uniformly support Democratic candidates.
The legal argument by conservative and moderate union members is that so much of what these unions do is inherently political that the members’ free-speech rights are trampled by forcing them to pay union dues as a compulsory aspect of working at, say, a public school or Department of Motor Vehicles.
My guess: Compulsory union fees will be ruled unconstitutional violations and national membership in public-employee unions will drop significantly, following the Wisconsin pattern.
The biggest impact will be on K-12 school policy in the states.
There will be a longer-term impact in other areas since weaker unions cannot stop the rise of autonomous busses or autonomous lawnmowers and floor cleaners, which will give cities and states more service for less money.
◆ Megyn Kelly: No thanks, say critics and potential guests, after her terrible start (Washington Post)
Stars now shying away from interviews after Jane Fonda mess
Megyn Kelly said on the first episode of her new NBC morning show, which aired Monday, that for years she’d “dreamed of hosting an uplifting show.”
But just three episodes in, her celebrity guests seem to find the show anything but uplifting. Kelly’s penchant for speaking her mind, regardless of how her words might be perceived, caused two of her celebrity guests to speak out against the host after their respective appearances.
The most recent was Jane Fonda, whom Kelly pressed to discuss her plastic surgery. –Washington Post
Comment: One problem is that Fox viewers think she “betrayed” her network and thus her “side.”
A second is that she was always better at hard-news interviews than soft-focus ones. But her new time slot is tailored for morning uplift, not hard news.
Third, some media critics have said that she is the kind of woman who appeals more to male viewers than female viewers. But the morning audience is heavily female.
NBC gave her bucket loads of cash and removed a steady program to give her a slot. They must be slashing their wrists.
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Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, reached that conclusion from transcripts of interviews with people close to Comey and provided by the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Those transcripts, the Republicans said in a Thursday letter to current FBI Director Chris Wray, show Comey had already drafted a conclusion for his investigation before interviewing 17 key witnesses, including Clinton, and before the DOJ had reached immunity agreements with former Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson. CBS News
Oh, those Iranian mullahs. 
The bill would bar states from blocking autonomous vehicles and
The White House Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump. Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington, float above the daily political grind and create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements. –Washington Post
Ms. Merkel is seeking a fourth term in national elections on Sept. 24, a race that has grown more challenging in recent weeks after her center-left rivals, the Social Democrats, unanimously selected a new candidate, Martin Schulz, to lead them into the fight. –New York Times
The accident occurred when the driver of a second vehicle “failed to yield” to the Uber vehicle while making a turn, said Josie Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the Tempe Police Department.
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urrent bioengineering techniques, like 3-D printing, can’t build the intricate, branching network of blood vessels that makes up the heart tissue. However, a team of researchers from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), University of Wisconsin-Madison and Arkansas Sate University-Jonesboro have successfully turned to plants. –Science Alert
Regulatory overkill started long before Mr. Obama. But Mr. Donohue calls the last eight years a “regulatory onslaught that loaded unprecedented burdens on business and the economy.”
The FBI has begun preparing for a major mole hunt to determine how anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks got an alleged arsenal of hacking tools the CIA has used to spy on espionage targets, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Mr. Trump had a productive meeting with Mr. Abrams on Tuesday, according to a White House official and a person close to Mr. Abrams. But after it took place, Mr. Trump learned of Mr. Abrams’s pointed criticisms of the president when he was running for president, the administration official said. Among those criticisms was a column headlined “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate,” which appeared in May 2016 in The Weekly Standard. –New York Times
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◆ Google is producing all the high-tech in its latest, self-driving cars 
◆ Dead at 82: Iran’s former president Rafsanjani
◆ North Korea tells Trump it can test missiles whenever it wants
◆ Britain’s foreign secretary, a key figure in Brexit, meets Trump team
◆ Actress I have never heard of really doesn’t like Paul Ryan
◆ Uber begins selling its traffic data
⇒ Comment: 
Student at prestigious liberal-arts college called “white supremacist,” “fascist,” and more by cyberbullies at her school. Her crime was asking for a shared ride to a Trump event. She was distraught enough by the harassment to call the suicide hotline before dropping out
⇒ Comment: 
