Trump Tax Breaks Break the Mold, Again

Yesterday in Arizona, former President Trump offered the latest in a series of tax-cut proposals that confound the left’s (and the liberal media’s) stereotypes. He called for an end to federal taxes on overtime pay. The main beneficiaries of these breaks, Trump pointed out, are hourly workers – firefighters, police, construction workers, mechanics and so on. They’re among the hardest-working men and women in our nation, and so often forgotten, he says.

This latest proposal follows on Trump’s previous tax proposals that have a similar benefit for working Americans and retirees. He has asked for an end to federal taxation of social security benefits (41 states don't tax social security) and no tax on tips (the latter idea quickly copied – without credit to the author – by Kamala Harris).

Don’t miss the larger significance here (as the self-congratulatory ABC News debate moderators do). Trump is the guy Kamala Harris says is all about tax cuts for the rich, aiding his billionaire buddies in Manhattan and Silicon Valley. But the Trump proposals are 180 degrees away from that. Trump is in the midst of a reengineering of the Republican Party, long derided as the domain of yacht owners and country clubbers, into a party of middle America. Some in the GOP hierarchy, themselves no strangers to these clubs, don’t get it. They didn’t get it when Ronald Reagan started this transformation, and they don’t get it now as Donald Trump strives to finish it.

Whatever happens on November 5, this transformation is working. Among working class families, polls show that Trump is beating Harris by a margin of two-to-one. And it’s not just Trump’s ideas, it’s hers too. What has she promised? Well, in the classic liberal Democrat trope, she promises to give people money: $25,000 for down payments on a house, start-up business grants. It’s not letting people keep more of their own money – it’s a transfer of costs to the taxpayer. 

Each of these policies only reinforces the idea that the recipient is a ward of the state.

Trump, in turn, allows workers to keep more of their hard-earned cash. Dignity and freedom come with it, not dependence. This is the reality that spurs Trump’s relentless barbs about “Comrade” Kamala. She wants you to thank her for whatever you have – not to have the reward of your own sweat and labor. The Democrat Party of a half century used to get this. The socialist and Marxist wings of that party are now the whole bird.

The Debate: Bias Worse Than You Think

Meanwhile, more stories are coming in about the bias in ABC News’ moderation of the Trump-Harris debate. In the Wall Street Journal, two political veterans, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, excoriate ABC News for its moderators’ clear decision to fact check Trump and completely ignore the lies and misstatements of Harris. Penn and Stein are both prominent Democrats – Penn as a longtime pollster who advised Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Stein as a former New York City council president. Their judgment was sharp: “When referees put their thumbs on the scale, the game changes. The results have to be thrown out, we are robbed of our time, and democracy is drained of its meaning.”

Penn and Stein joined in the initial reaction that Harris had prepped and learned her lines well, clearly winning the debate. But after reviewing the video again and comparing notes, they became concerned, they write, about what ABC News “did to our democracy.” It became clear to them that ABC News had made a decision before the debate to fact check and cross-examine Trump but ignore any falsehood coming from Harris, even the egregious assertion that Trump had called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people,” a claim even the partisan Snopes website has concluded is totally false. 

As if to confirm Penn and Stein’s point, ABC News moderator Linsey Davis actually took a victory lap in the Los Angeles Times, hyping the network’s bias and the motivation behind it. Hailed by the liberal Times as a “rising star,” Davis candidly related how she and co-moderator David Muir spent weeks before the debate planning their questions and identifying subjects, like abortion and infanticide, where they felt they could trip up Trump. 

Davis revealed the aim was to avoid what had happened in the disastrous June debate between Trump and Joe Biden, which led to the incumbent President being driven from the race. “People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” Davis told the Times over breakfast at the Philadelphia Ritz-Carlton. 

Well, ABC News sure wasn’t going to allow that to happen again. There are many examples. Take the issue of tariffs on foreign goods. Pundits like to pay homage to free trade and care for workers, but look the other way when American jobs migrate overseas to countries like China, where wages lag and workers’ freedom does not exist. Or Kamala’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains. Its impact would be devastating and, like all tax schemes, once installed, it will only grow.

When you start an Apple, Google, Amazon or any successful company, you aren’t wealthy overnight. The share that starts out at the price of $1, if you’re successful, may grow to $150 or more. That increase, when realized, represents value, employs millions, and can be reinvested for more growth. Taxed before it has a chance to do that, will only enhance the government’s growth and control over the economy for pet projects like “climate change.”

Does Harris know that? Did ABC News want you to know that? They were too busy trying to rectify Biden’s collapse at the Atlanta debate to ask such obvious questions. 

It wasn’t always this way. Not that long ago, NBC News host Tim Russert was a ubiquitous presence on that network’s news shows, including helming its leading Sunday talk show, Meet the Press. Russert made it a habit, no matter who he was interviewing, to comb the NBC News archives for the interviewee’s past statements and positions. He would not hesitate a second to “roll the tape” when a guest appeared and seemed to have changed their position on something. “What’s changed?” he would ask. But Russert would do this without fear or favor, and every guest was on notice that they would be made to account for past statements.

This is not the state of American media today, and it’s a shame. Penn and Stein deserve credit for going on the record with strong language about ABC News’ travesty. In the meantime, the new liberal mantra is that Trump is avoiding another debate because of Harris’s triumph. I hold to Trump’s portrayal of the standard in the boxing world. It’s the guy who lost the bout who yells immediately for a rematch. The respected Fabrizio-Lee poll, reported last night, taken in seven swing states, had the race tied before the debate and Trump up by three points after the debate.   

If Kamala Harris is seeing the same thing, it would explain why she is running to the mic demanding another fight. That would be consistent with the results I shared yesterday showing Trump prevailing on the issues voters say matter most. Millions of Americans are concerned about whether the sun is setting on the America we love so much. They are right to be worried.

Haiti, Voodoo and Cats

The left is having a good old time mocking Donald Trump because he mentioned in the debate the reports coming out of Springfield, Ohio, that Haitian migrants are eating local residents’ cats and dogs.

Are these elitists even aware that the “religion” of voodoo is widely practiced in Haiti? Voodoo is demonic and it does indeed involve animal sacrifice. In addition, Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world and people there will eat cats and other “pets” to survive.  Watch this video by a Haitian American that confirms the facts about Haiti.

Of course, the goal of Kamala Harris, the ABC News moderators and the neo-Marxist left is to avoid, at all costs, a debate about what the Harris/Biden open border policies have done to American communities. The leftist elites go home to their gated communities and their homes in Nantucket, while middle America in places like Springfield, Ohio, pays the price for mass migration.

Other Headlines

• A federal judge in Texas blocked Biden/Harris regulations that would mandate taxpayer-funded transgender sex change surgeries under Obamacare and Medicaid.

• Election integrity legislation enacted in Texas has removed more than one million ineligible individuals from the voter rolls, including more than 6,500 non-citizens. More than 1,900 of them actually have cast ballots.

• A lawsuit has been filed against all Arizona counties for failing to remove illegal aliens from their voter rolls.

• A lawsuit has forced Nevada officials to examine the voter rolls in Clark County (Las Vegas) for bogus registrations at “bad addresses.”