WE NEED MORE TRANSPARENCY AND CERTAINTY: Trump calls on Congress to end ‘surprise medical bills.’

ANDREW MALCOLM: What These Wannabe Dem Presidents Plan For U$.

• Slap a new tax on banks with more than $50 million in assets. Kamala Harris especially likes this one, which would bring in an estimated $61 billion. Banks are big and bad, unless you want or have home mortgage.

• Increase by 88 percent the amount of income Americans must pay Social Security taxes on from the current $132,900 up to at least a quarter-million. Maybe more. Yeh, sure, some middle-class families will be caught in the cash net. But see, silly person who doesn’t understand how government works, they’re spending all the current Social Security tax income already. So, they need more for new programs, probably another $800+ billion.

• People are making too much money from investments that can help create jobs. So, jack the capital gains by 50 percent to 30 percent. That might rake in more than $600 billion, assuming it doesn’t stop much investing..

• And let’s cut into that mortgage interest tax deduction. Too many Americans are owning or buying homes and affording it. That’s worth a good $972 billion at least.

• Here’s a good one: Hike the federal tax on a gallon of gasoline by “only” 10 cents, which is actually 65 percent. This should bring in another $170 billion. Sure, it hits regular working folks the hardest, but we all must make financial sacrifices for the greener good. Also, tell town halls the money will pay for infrastructure repairs. That’s a good line. Some Republicans might even go for it, unless they know Grover Norquist.

• Oh, and index that enlarged gas tax to inflation so it’ll increase automatically forever and politicians won’t have to wait another 26 years for new revenues.

• Finally – well, it’s not really final because there are many other tax ideas – let’s install a value-added tax. This will be a five percent levy on every step of any item’s production process. Europe loves them. Yes, yes, it would hike consumer prices considerably. But it would bring in – are you sitting down? – nearly $6.2 Trillion.

“Vote Democrat If You Think You Have Too Much Money” doesn’t seem like a great pitch, but what do I know?

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? “Brazil to allow crime reporters to carry guns for protection” reports the UK Press Gazette. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Second Amendment says what it says and though I haven’t owned a weapon in decades, the people who want to stop you from owning one are for the most part wrong. That said, step back and think about journalists carrying sidearms. I know literally hundreds of journalists, and can count less than 10 of them who know anything about firearms. The idea of an armed Jim Acosta ought to scare anyone. And remember this guy?

The point is that I’m not really sure that arming people who think ear plugs are some sort of riot round, or that “an AR-15 “shotgun” was used in the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shooting is a really great idea.

To be sure, journalists in places like Mexico and Brazil are truly at risk, and if open carry makes them safer, I’m all for it. I just hope that the periodistas are more informed than their American counterparts. I’ve written about this at The Daily Caller.

OBVIOUS SYNERGIES: Why not pair the “knife missile” in Stephen Green’s post below with the chainsaw-wielding, carbon-based-lifeform-eating EATR robot from a few years back for maximum medieval-style terror? I suggest this only so Skynet will kill me last.

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ZUCKERBERG UNDER FIRE: Any Attempt to Remove Him from Facebook Is Doomed. “Not since Apple’s iMac-iPod-iPhone-iPad heyday under Steve Jobs’ second regime has a company been a more perfect reflection of its founder. But whatever the company’s predations, lapses, or silencing of dissent, you can’t cleave Zuckerberg from Facebook any more than you can separate a cyborg’s human brain from its robot body.”

LIKE I SAID, THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Got gonorrhea? It may have come from French kissing, study says.

ASSASSIN’S CREED (21ST CENTURY EDITION): Drones used missiles with knife warhead to take out single terrorist targets.

“To the targeted person, it is as if a speeding anvil fell from the sky,” according to the WSJ. Some officials referred to the weapon as “the flying Ginsu,” because the blades can cut through concrete, sheet metal, and other materials surrounding a target.

The R9X was developed in part as a response to President Barack Obama’s mandate to reduce civilian casualties in drone strikes, especially in light of the tactic adopted by leaders of targeted terrorist and insurgent organizations (such as the leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) of using women and children as a human shield in hopes of avoiding drone strikes. While the missile was apparently in development as far back as 2011, the exact timeline of development was not revealed by officials; a similar weapon was considered as an option to take out Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan before it was decided to send Navy SEAL operators in instead.

According to the Journal’s sources, the DOD has only used the R9X about six times. The Journal confirmed two strikes—one, in January of 2019 by the Air Force against Jamal al-Badawi, the individual accused of being the mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole (a strike that the Pentagon has officially acknowledged, but without disclosing the weapons used); and a CIA strike against Al Qaeda leader Ahmad Hasan Abu Khayr al-Masri in February of 2017. In both cases, the strikes took out the targets but did not blow up the vehicles they were in—in the case of the attack on al-Masri, there was only a hole in the roof of his Kia and a crack in the windshield.

It’s like something out of a steampunk story, but real.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Nearly 40 percent of graduating college seniors feel unprepared for a career: survey.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Diabetes hospitalizations spike among young adults in U.S.

AN UNEXPECTED BIT OF GOOD NEWS: Biden Echoes Libertarians’ Call on Occupational Licensing.

“You know if you are a hair braider, you braid people’s hair, you have to get a license to do something like 400 hours of training,” he said before pausing, admitting he should be “more careful” with his words, and concluding that licensing requirements were part of a greater unseen effort “not to help the worker.”

The union crowd in Washington, D.C., gave the gaffe-prone politician a laugh, and three weeks later at his presidential campaign kickoff, Biden recycled the talking point.

“Why should someone who braids hair have to get 600 hours of training? It makes no sense,” he told another labor crowd, this one packed into a union hall in Pittsburgh. “They’re making it harder and harder in a whole range of professions, all to keep competition down.”

Why, Biden continued, should unionized pipefitters, firefighters, and steelworkers care about “getting rid of these unnecessary hoops out there? Because we have to restore America’s ability and individual American’s ability to fight for their own dignity.”

The union members in the crowd and the workers standing behind the candidate applauded again — reliably Democratic voters all cheering the kind of government deregulation that has been the pet project of libertarian billionaires like Charles and David Koch for half a decade. It was a moment of pragmatic centrism.

Ball’s in your court, GOP — are you going to let Joe Biden get to your right on an economic liberty issue?

FAKE NEWS: Washington Post implies Trump encourages shooting border crossers.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Oregon Elementary School Teacher Tried to Convince 8-Year-Old Student He’s Transgender.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: “The West is not done yet.”

SPENGLER: The Huelefant in the Parlor.

The grand battle of the Trade Avengers in Washington really isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. What matters is the implosion of America’s technological predominance, exemplified by the Trump administration’s strategic humiliation over Fifth Generation (5G) mobile broadband.

In 1258 the Mongols appeared before the gates of Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Dynasty. Caliph Al-Musta’sim assumed that the capital’s 12-foot-thick walls would protect the city against lightly-armed Mongol horsemen, but the Mongols brought with them a thousand Chinese siege engineers. The Chinese mercenaries breached the walls within three weeks and the Mongols killed most of the city’s million residents.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, who last week claimed that China is “stealing its way up the economic ladder,” is the 21st-century counterpart of Al-Musta’sim, the feckless caliph of Baghdad. Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000. I think it foolish to think that the Chinese can’t innovate, but it doesn’t matter whether they can or not, any more than the siege skills of Mongol horsemen mattered in 1258.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

WILLIAM MURCHISON: Joe Biden: Soul Man. “The former senator and veep thinks Trump-era America needs some moral straightening out.”

The second problem with the “soul” stuff is easily more important. It is the assertion that politics fundamentally shapes our souls. The truth is, our souls shape our politics, maybe more so than Aristotle anticipated in an era unblessed with talk shows and the internet. In any kind of democracy, the majority tends, over the long if not the short term, to get the kind of government it wants. That could be one of honorable men and women acting—to speak broadly, as you have to in politics—with honorable intentions for the sensible cure of public problems. On the other hand, you might get a coterie of mush-brained incompetents. You open yourself, in theory, to government by a gang of rascals and crooks and thoroughgoing immoralists.

You do the best you can. But everything depends on premises. With the right premises, the voters win; with the wrong ones, they lose. No politician can render it otherwise, not even Biden.

So what are premises? They are moral understandings—what else? It’s what’s stuffed in human heads and hearts at various levels of pre-political life. By preachers and priests. By good parents and grandparents. By good teachers and the authors of good books. I can’t refrain from mentioning, for that matter, a technicolor world that faded some time ago to sepia: the entertainment industry and its semi-commendable premises of wisdom and good taste.

From hereabouts come the ideals, the ideas, the assumptions that the voter carries to the polls. They guide the hands that shade in the ovals that register our choices on election day; they do so more tellingly, more lastingly, than all the solemn rants that pass for political wisdom on the talk shows.

Biden, the Moses who would straighten us all out if you take him at his word, has in mind a miracle nearly as large as the parting of the Red Sea.

And on a more practical level, I’m not sure the country wants to hear an 18-month-long lecture on morality from a guy who made his son filthy rich playing footsie with Moscow and Beijing.

CAN’T KEEP UP THE SAME OLD GAME: Beto O’Rourke Approaching ‘Statistically Insignificant’ Territory in New Hampshire Poll. “‘White Obama’ looking more and more like a white Rubio.”

Heh™.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, WIMPY CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS EDITION: Texas Christian college student gov votes to ban Chick-fil-A.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Comey’s Break with Reality Continues at CNN Town Hall. “Papadopoulos didn’t talk to RUSSIANS, unless you are pretending that western intelligence asset Joseph Mifsud is really working for the RUSSIANS. Read all about Joseph Mifsud in Lee Smith’s terrific story, The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate. If Comey really believes his own crap, why didn’t the FBI go to Trump and tell him one of his associates was involved with the RUSSIANS?”

HARSH BUT FAIR.

UPDATE: Comey: Yeah, Strzok and Page made us all look bad, huh?

WELL, WE’RE TALKING BERNIE AND AOC HERE: Tom Maguire: The US Post Office to provide banking services to the underserved? The numbers don’t add up! Well, sounds like it’s more about using fees from poor people to prop up employment of unionized, Dem-voting postal employees. And political hacks: “From yet another perspective, the Japanese had a more extensive Postal Bank with huge private savings. A 2005 Parliamentary campaign was oriented towards privatizing it. Apparently this institution had become cozy with crony capitalists and politicos. Who could have seen that coming?” I think Bernie and AOC do, and to them it’s not a bug, but a feature.

Plus, note this piece on how, rather than being a ripoff, check-cashing businesses often serve poor people better than banks.