Archives for August 2018
PEACH BEACH Shave Ice Shack Needs workers in August and September
PEACH BEACH Shave Ice Shack is seeking several enthusiastic individuals to work this August and September. We are open 7 days a week, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. through Labor Day and weekends in the Fall. Email Jackie at peachbeachcc@gmail.com or text at (434) 547-2800. Must have excellent customer service skills and references.
New Vending Machine coming to Beach
Town Council approved the installation of a vending machine which will be installed near the public restrooms. Council agreed to allow the vendor to place the machine at this location for one year, at which time they will revisit to analyze the ending numbers. The vendor will be responsible for installing the electrical hookup if one is not available for use.
Drinks will be priced at $1.50, of which the town will receive $.33 in return. Treasurer Debra Pocock told the Council that the main purpose of the machine would be to provide a convenient way for folks on the pier or at the beach to be able to grab a quick drink without having to trek all the way back into town, or out on the highway.
Councilman Grossman was wary and noted that it was the town that would be providing the electricity, and that, according to his calculations, several hundred cans would have to be sold for them to break even on the cost.
Chris Bannon noted that it was always just about cost and that it this was another way of providing a service for the tourists.
Treasurer Debra Pocock told the council that, given the location, the machine would not have any adverse effects on local businesses.
Did Obama Weaponize the FBI to target Trump?
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today the FBI turned over 70 pages of heavily redacted records about Christopher Steele, the former British spy, hired with Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funds, who authored the infamous Dossier targeting President Trump during last year’s presidential campaign. The documents show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The documents show at least 11 FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that he was admonished for unknown reasons in February 2016. The documents were turned over in response to Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records of communications and payments between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and his private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-00916)).
From Judicial Watch:
“Judicial Watch uncovered 70 pages of heavily redacted documents showing the shady cash-based relationship between the Comey FBI and Christopher Steele who at the same time was working for the Clinton / DNC-funded Fusion GPS to dig up fake dirt on then-candidate Trump. Pretty extraordinary stuff.
It’s one thing to hear in news articles that Christopher Steele had been paid by the FBI, but here we have the documents showing he met with the FBI at least thirteen times during the 2016 campaign season – with eleven of those times resulting in cash payments. So he’s getting money from the Clinton campaign, and he’s also getting money from the FBI.
The first major document talks about Christopher Steele being admonished early in 2016, yet he meets with the FBI repeatedly afterward. And finally, in November 2016, the documents show that – because he was leaking his relationship with the FBI – he’s deemed ‘not suitable’ as a confidential human source. So this source who was deemed ‘not suitable’ then is repeatedly used to justify FISA warrants to spy on the Trump team. It shows there is corruption at the heart of the Russia investigation.”
A government agency using taxpayer money to make fake dirt for one campaign to use against the other campaign…?
“These new docs show the shady, cash-based relationship the Obama FBI had with Clinton operative Christopher Steele. The anti-Trump Russia ‘investigation’ had Christopher Steele at its center and his misconduct was no impediment to using information from his Russia intelligence collaborators to spy on the Trump team. The corruption and abuse is astonishing.” — Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Social Democrats prepare to trash the Constitution
While normal daily editor David Leonhardt is on vacation, the New York Times is bringing in outside writers to cover the morning newsletter until Aug. 27. This week’s authors are Meagan Day and Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, the socialist magazine. The NYTs, by providing this very visible platform on what is basically the official newsletter of the Democratic Party, allows for an insight into just where they are heading. And that is a brazen, all-out attack on the US Constitution. From the Day and Sunkara newsletter:
Consider a few facts: Donald Trump is in the White House, despite winning almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The Senate, the country’s most powerful legislative chamber, grants the same representation to Wyoming’s 579,315 residents as it does to 39,536,653 Californians. Key voting rights are denied to citizens in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other United States territories. The American government is structured by an 18th-century text that is almost impossible to change.
These ills didn’t come about by accident; the subversion of democracy was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers. For James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 10, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” incompatible with the rights of property owners. The byzantine Constitution he helped create serves as the foundation for a system of government that rules over people, rather than an evolving tool for popular self-government.
Writers on the left such as Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman and the journalist Daniel Lazare have long argued that constitutional reform needs to be on the agenda. Even some liberals like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias rightly worry that the current system of governance is headed toward collapse. [Read more…]
Parkland Shooter Asked for Help, but Was Denied
School officials “did not follow through” when Nikolas Cruz asked for special assistance months before the massacre, a new report finds.
The Sun-Sentinel released parts of a new report that found that Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz asked school officials for help months before he allegedly gunned down 14 fellow classmates and three adults—but the school district “did not follow through.”
That failure by school officials was singled out in a court-ordered report released Friday into the school district’s handling of Cruz’s behavioral issues. While more than half of the report was redacted, the blacked-out sections of the document could still easily be read by copying and pasting into a separate document, a trick used by The Sun-Sentinel to release the unredacted report.
Among the conclusions in the report, authored by the Collaborative Educational Network of Tallahassee, are two glaring instances in which Broward school officials failed to act in accordance with laws governing the treatment of students with disabilities.
In Cruz’s junior year, after he had already begun exhibiting behavior so disturbing it led to guidance counselors wanting to have him committed, the teenager sat down with education specialists to discuss his options for further schooling. He was told he could transfer to Cross Creek, a school tailored for students with special needs; sue the Broward school district; or stay at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School without any special counseling. According to a review of that meeting featured in the new report, school officials left out one crucial fact: Cruz was still entitled to special assistance at Stoneman Douglas if he chose to stay.
Being unaware of this option, however, Cruz—whose developmental delays were flagged at age 3—was reportedly stripped of counseling services and left to fend for himself as a “regular student.”
Months later, when Cruz changed his mind and sought to transfer to Cross Creek, the school district “did not follow through,” according to the report. He dropped out on Feb. 8, 2017, due to failing grades, and three days later purchased an AR-15, the same one used a year later in what has now become one of the deadliest school shootings in the U.S.
Is the Press the real enemy of the People?
Special Opinion to the Mirror by Paul Plante.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
That, for anyone who recognizes it, is the language of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and with respect to “freedom of the press,” it should properly be read as “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
As I was taught when young, and God alone knows what is taught today on the subject, if anything, we in this country owe John Peter Zenger a debt for freedom of the press, not the First Amendment.
For those who have forgotten, or never were taught in the first place, John Peter Zenger (October 26, 1697 – July 28, 1746) was a German American printer and journalist in New York City who printed The New York Weekly Journal. [Read more…]
Guess who will pay for glory of Democratic Socialism?
American democratic socialists are poised make a big blue wave this fall. Folks like Bernie Sanders promise free college, a single-payer health care system, guaranteed jobs, and more. But, how will they pay for all these promises? The reality is that these measures would require extremely high expenditures that would cause the federal deficit to skyrocket. Once the costs become clear, most mainstream politicians and voters will more than likely tell them to go pack sand. Math always gets in the way of sleepy unicorn dreams.
Let’s add up the cost
The Mercatus Center, a libertarian-leaning center at George Mason University, estimated that Sanders’s Medicare-for-all plan would cost the government $32 trillion over the next decade.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assumes a baseline budget deficit of $12.4 trillion over the next decade (assuming current laws continue). And even these projections assume that last year’s tax cuts expire on schedule, though they may well be renewed, and that the recent two-year discretionary spending hike is not renewed in 2020. Most of this deficit is driven by the escalating Social Security and Medicare system deficits.
Using CBO’s figures, Sanders has proposed a Social Security expansion, including higher cost-of-living adjustments and higher minimum benefit levels, that the liberal Tax Policy Center estimates will cost $188 billion over the next decade.
The Tax Policy Center adds these numbers:
Sanders “free college” proposal at $807 billion over the next decade.
The center estimates that Sanders’s proposal of up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for new parents and for people with serious health conditions would cost another $270 billion.
The cost of replacing private insurance, including copayments, with a Medicare-for-all plan are more brutal. The liberal Urban Institute estimates that Sanders’s single-payer health plan would add $32 trillion in federal costs over the decade. Note that that’s the exact same figure produced by those George Mason libertarians.
Ocasio-Cortez and Senate Democrats also want to guarantee a job for anyone who wants one, at $15 per hour plus benefits. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, commissioned a report by outside scholars Darrick Hamilton, William Darity, and Mark Paul that estimates the cost of a more modest proposal along these lines (with a lower wage, for example). It suggested the cost would be $56,000 apiece for 9.7 million enrollees, for a total of $6.8 trillion over the next decade.
As a note, this enrollment estimate for the jobs program is marginally low. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assumes nearly all participants would come from the ranks of the jobless who are seeking work. Realistically, the 60 million Americans currently earning less than $15 per hour (plus many retirees and longtime labor force dropouts) would also stampede into this program.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities asserts that employers would retain such workers with large raises, or a higher minimum wage. But clearly, some of these 60 million workers would be laid off and possibly replaced with automation, particularly in industries with tight profit margins. Those job losses would expand this program’s participation, as would an influx of workers who simply want an easier job or more hours than their current jobs.
Still, we will assume for the purposes of a rough calculation that the center’s figure is correct — while keeping in mind that the actual cost could easily triple that amount
Senate Democrats have promised $1 trillion for new infrastructure, and House Democrats are rallying around legislation to pay off all $1.4 trillion in student loan debt — both of which the far left generally supports. I will exclude vague promises such as universal pre-K and expanded special education funding.
Total cost: $42.5 trillion in new proposals over the next decade, on top of the $12.4 trillion baseline deficit.
To put this in perspective, Washington is currently projected to collect $44 trillion in revenues over the next decade. And the Republican tax cut, decried universally by Democrats as irresponsible (and by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as “Armageddon”) will cost less than $2 trillion over the decade.
The 30-year projected tab for these programs is even more staggering: new proposals costing $218 trillion, on top of an $84 trillion baseline deficit driven by Social Security, Medicare, and the resulting interest costs.
What would be the effects of such an unprecedented spending binge? Federal spending, which typically ranges between 18 and 22 percent of GDP, would immediately soar past 40 percent of GDP on its way to nearly 50 percent within three decades. Including state and local government spending would push the total cost of government to 60 percent of GDP by that point — exceeding the current spending level of every country in Europe.
No, single-payer doesn’t just involve a straightforward shift from private payments to taxes
These numbers are not partisan. They come from the Congressional Budget Office, top liberal think tanks, and the lawmakers themselves. They are the left’s own figures. (And note that we included an absurdly low-cost estimate for the jobs guarantee.)
Nevertheless, many advocates claim that single-payer health care will not worsen America’s fiscal problem, and may even be part of the solution. These plan scores show otherwise.
First, single-payer would not “fix” Washington’s current unsustainable health spending, as its advocates often claim. Medicare’s existing $6 trillion cash shortfall over the next decade (which soars to a $40 trillion shortfall over 30 years) would not be reduced because Medicare is already a price-controlled, single-payer system that would merely become more generous under Medicare-for-all. Perhaps advocates should pay for Medicare’s existing obligations before expanding the system to everyone else.
Second, single-payer proponents claim that the $32 trillion single-payer cost should be considered differently from the other expenditures, since, in theory, money spent privately on health insurance and other health-care costs would now be spent by the government. Essentially, goes the argument, the dollars that went to health premiums and copays would instead go to taxes, with no one worse off.
The Urban Institute score shows otherwise. The $4 trillion saved by state and local governments on programs like Medicaid and CHIP, over 10 years, and the $22 trillion saved by families and businesses on premiums and out-of-pocket expenses cannot easily be converted into a $26 trillion “single-payer tax” without serious economic and redistributive side effects.
Designing a politically acceptable $26 trillion tax hike, even if families and businesses would then have more money, is nearly impossible. CBO data suggest that a new payroll tax, which is one of the “pay-fors” Sanders has emphasized, would need to be set at 29 percent in order to raise $26 trillion over the decade. And that is on top of the existing 15.3 percent payroll tax and all other federal and state taxes.
Hardest hit would be the 77 million Medicaid recipients who currently pay no health insurance premiums (just limited copays), and thus would not receive any “insurance premium windfall” to help pay for their steep new taxes. Overall, converting these $26 trillion in savings into a “single-payer tax” is so difficult that Sanders’s own page of tax increase options comes up with just $16 trillion. And even those tax scores are not independently verified, are often politically unrealistic, and fail to account for any revenues lost to interactions between tax proposals or macroeconomic responses.
What’s more, even if Washington could tax all $26 trillion saved by families, businesses, and state governments, there remains a final $6 trillion federal cost that represents the increase in total national health spending.
Yes, according to the Urban Institute and others, the Sanders plan raises US health spending. This is because American single-payer proposals are far more generous than other nations’ systems; its population is less healthy; and, most overlooked, America decided decades ago to invest more heavily than other nations in expensive technology, roomy hospitals, and pharmaceutical research.
Maintaining this larger infrastructure costs money and limits how deeply provider payments can be cut to pay for the substantial coverage expansions. All of this helps explain why a single-payer system would cost more in America than in other nations.
George Mason’s Mercatus Center study did find that single-payer would reduce projected national health spending by 2 percent. But it did so by charitably assuming Sanders’s immediate (and implausible) 40 percent cut in provider payments would occur. (When, in passing, the center examined more modest and realistic provider payment reductions, it found the plan would cost an additional $5.4 trillion.)
The Urban Institute score also assumes that payment rates could fall significantly, but to a lesser degree than the Mercatus Center. And the liberal economist Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, who has designed single-payer legislation himself and is considered sympathetic to this approach, found a price tag for the Sanders plan similar to that of the Urban Institute.
Regardless of whether national health expenditures slightly rise or fall, virtually every analysis — liberal or conservative — agrees that Washington must come up with roughly $30 trillion to finance single-payer health care.
And here is a key point: Even setting aside the feasibility of a 40 percent cut to health providers, I have yet to come across even one specific single-payer proposal that raises anywhere close to the roughly $30 trillion needed to pay for the new system (much less “solves” the existing Medicare deficit, as is often claimed).
The Sanders 2016 campaign’s single-payer plan came up $14 trillion short, and his new legislation ignores the tax side altogether. If converting all the health savings from state governments, businesses, and families into a “single-payer tax” is so easy, why has no one come up with a blueprint? Until there is an actual plan that includes the necessary taxes, a fiscally responsible single-payer system will remain a fiction
Paying for socialism
According to the left’s own sources, democratic socialism will cost $42.5 trillion in its first decade. How would the US pay for it?
Under the most generous assumptions possible, liberal proposals would cut $8.5 trillion on the spending side. To begin with, state governments no longer burdened with health care costs would save $4.1 trillion, according to the Urban Institute. The popular leftist goal of slashing defense spending down to Europe’s target of 2 percent of GDP, for which there is no plausible blueprint, would nonetheless save $1.9 trillion if achieved, according to CBO data. Charitably assuming that the jobs guarantee would reduce antipoverty spending by one-quarter would save $2.5 trillion.
Paying for the remaining $34 trillion would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues. Let’s examine three paths using data from CBO’s menu of budget savings:
- What about just taxing corporations and rich families? Raising the final $34 trillion would require seizing roughly 100 percent of all corporate profits as well as 100 percent of all family wage income and pass-through business income above the thresholds of $90,000 (single) or $150,000 (married), and absurdly assuming they all continue working. (This calculation refers to individual income, not investment income.)
- How about a European-style value-added tax (VAT), which is basically a national sales tax? A rate of 87 percent would be needed to collect $34 trillion under the American tax base.
- What about payroll taxes? Lawmakers would need to create a new 37 percent payroll tax, on top of the existing 15.3 percent payroll tax, in order to collect $34 trillion.
And the taxes do not stop there. There is still that aforementioned baseline budget deficit of $12.4 trillion over the decade, and $84 trillion over 30 years (driven almost exclusively by growing Social Security and Medicare shortfalls). It is not sustainable to allow budget deficits to swell to nearly 10 percent of GDP during peace and prosperity. So tack on an additional across-the-board income tax hike of 15 percentage points just to pay for the growing costs of our current federal programs.
Mix and match these tax policies and it still represents an unfathomable and impossible tax burden. American taxes would be higher than most of Europe because its spending levels would also be higher. (Our health care system would still cost more, and Europe does not have an expensive government job guarantee.)
Taxing the rich is not enough. America would need to match, or even surpass, Europe’s enormous tax burden on the middle class. There is no evidence that American voters will accept this level of taxation.
Democratic socialists are disingenuously cagey about the exorbitant tax burden they require. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently offered a list of tax increases — such as a 28 percent corporate tax rate, a “Buffett tax” on millionaires, and carbon tax — that collectively add up to just $2 trillion over the decade, according to the CBO.
More broadly, advocates often downplay the cost of their proposals by introducing them one at a time, hiding the cumulative costs, and recycling the same tax increases across different proposals. But the 2017 tax cuts can be repealed only once. And tax rates on the rich can be raised only so many times.
If democratic socialists and their allies are serious, they must move beyond slogans and figure out how to pay for these proposals, or scale them back to plausible levels similar to last year’s tax cuts (which cost a comparatively small $1.8 trillion).
The democratic socialists may do well in November. Yet upon arriving in Washington, they will discover that even their revolution cannot repeal the laws of math.
Data from Economist Magazine, as well as the research of senior Manhattan Institute fellow Brian Riedl was used in this article.
The BIG THREAT
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last week that the U.S. is in “crisis mode,” comparing the danger of a massive cyberattack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon.
A well-executed cyberattack could knock out the electrical grid and shut off power to a huge swath of the country, or compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real.
The Internet of Things, the sheer number of internet-connected devices, from cars to pacemakers, are adding to the vulnerability.
Gen. David Petraeus, former CIA director said, “What worries me most is a cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction falling into the hands of extremists who would, needless to say, be very difficult to deter, given their willingness to blow themselves up on the battlefield to take us with them.”
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta says the biggest threat is “a cyberattack that could paralyze the nation,” while former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says “cyberattacks on critical infrastructure from state or state-sponsored actors are the biggest threat right now.”
Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are the top U.S. adversaries in the cyber realm, but the great threat extends to non-state actors and criminal groups.
Over the last year, Russian hackers have infiltrated power stations and other points on the U.S. grid — and now are inside hundreds, empowering them to create chaos with massive blackouts.
Is this the New Cold War?
- The U.S. and Moscow are each capable of taking down large parts of the other’s infrastructure.
- “Since 2015, the Russian government has been clear that it has wanted a nuclear-like deterrence in cyberspace,” says Christopher Porter, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and chief intelligence strategist at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm. “The U.S. has shown ‘shock and awe’ in cyberspace, and Russia wants to show it can keep pace with the U.S.”
- That’s why Russia has launched hundreds of incursions against the U.S. grid. There’s no one main switch that can cause a massive nationwide blackout because the system itself is so decentralized.
- Russia has pushed for a cyber arms control agreement. But arms control experts say it will be extremely hard to formulate one that is verifiable and enforceable.
- While Russia’s grid attacks have been restrained. In 2016, it attacked and took down a large part of Ukraine’s electric grid, but did not use that as cover to send in tanks or capture more territory. Moscow seems to be signaling its capabilities.
“Companies in the energy, financial, and other key economic sectors need to develop the capacity to share threat information in real time, and give the government the visibility and information to take action when necessary to defend us,” says Matt Olsen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Cape Charles Mirror Reaches One Million Views
The Mirror has reached one million total individual views, something, given the size of this town, we never thought would happen.
The Mirror is a community project, and would like to thank all of the readers, those that take the time to post comments, those that contribute great stories and photos, the Town of Cape Charles staff for always being open and providing important information for the community, and also all the citizens that take the time to send us tips and news. The Mirror is a team effort, and we hope more people will jump in with news and stories.
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