Political scribe: GOP Tax Reform Is Paying Dividends
At the time it passed, polls suggested the Republican tax plan was the most unpopular bill in decades. Today, says Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, “it’s looking more and more as if that was a risk well worth taking.” A new Monmouth poll shows “a huge swing in favor of the bill” to 44 percent support, up from 26 percent in December. Other polls confirm “plenty of positive signs here for Republicans. And there are reasons to believe things could get better.” Especially since “people still don’t seem to recognize how the tax cuts will benefit them personally,” believing their taxes will increase instead of decreasing. So “passing a severely unpopular piece of legislation may just turn out to be a good move.”
Conservative: Putting Americans First on Immigration
President Trump’s “Americans are dreamers, too” admonition in his State of the Union address was “a brilliant retort to illegal-alien sentimentalism,” says City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald — which is why we’re already hearing “frustrated cries that he unjustly ‘appropriated’ the designation.” In fact, Trump made “a compelling case for an immigration system that puts the interests of Americans first.” He’s right to “demand the closure of loopholes that have allowed unaccompanied juvenile illegal aliens to evade the law;” and to “call for the end to chain migration and the visa lottery system.” Unfortunately, he said “nothing about “enforcing E-verify, which requires employers to certify electronically the legal status of their workers, and which would truncate the demand for illegal labor.”
Foreign desk: Poland Seeks To Weaponize Memory
In sections of eastern Europe, World War II is still vigorously debated, which Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky suggests “increases the temptation to legislate on history.” Now Poland has done just that, making it a crime to ascribe any responsibility for the Holocaust to the Polish state or the Polish people. The point is to end references to Nazi death camps in Poland as “Polish death camps.” But many in Israel believe Polish nationalists actually want to “stifle any mention of Poles’ collaboration with the Nazis.” Memory “is easy to weaponize and hard to put back into introspective mode.” Yet “if the battlefield cannot be cleared, it can at least be free of legislative obstacles. That way, the arguments are more likely never again to go beyond angry tweets and an occasional fistfight.”
Reporter: Why Did Trump Skip Over the National Debt?
Historically, the State of the Union has been “an opportunity to discuss the sorry state of America’s entitlements and the unsustainable trajectory of the national debt” — even if the annual promises to address them “are not meant to be taken seriously,” notes Eric Boehm at Reason. Still, it’s at least an acknowledgement that “yes, the president is aware of America’s long-term fiscal crisis,” and that “someone, someday, ought to do something about it.” But President Trump ignored both entitlements and the debt, even while praising the GOP tax bill, which adds “an estimated $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.” Sadly, “in a year when the national debt surpassed the symbolically important threshold of $20 trillion,” Trump “failed to pay even lip service to the country’s fiscal imbalance.”
Political scribe: The Fall of Obamanomics’ Poster Child
Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner recalls that he used to refer to General Electric as the “for-profit arm of the Obama administration.” Except for one problem: “It was a mistake to use the word ‘profit’.” Because “no component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average has performed worse since 2000 than General Electric.” And that, he says, is “a telling epigraph for Obamanomics.” Fact is, “whenever the Obama administration introduced a major policy initiative, GE was there hopping on board, looking to be the government’s partner.” Its big mistake: “GE spent a decade chasing the shiniest new winner picked by government, instead of looking for lasting value as dictated by the market.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann