Taxing “unrealized capital gains” sounds like a catchy and obscure way to make wealthy people pay more in taxes, but it doesn’t work.  A government that moves in this direction ignores the reality that people are not static.  The process also involves “taxing wealth” which then becomes an arbitrary definition.

Unrealized capital gains are not income, they are simply increases in value.

If your home was worth $200,000 last year and $300,000 this year, you have an unrealized capital gain of $100k.   A 15% tax bill on that value increase means the homeowner would have to pay $15,000 to the IRS.

Joe Biden is proposing to pay for his multi-trillion expansion in debt through this type of tax upon billionaires.   Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted this was part of their thinking to help pay for the Biden budget last Sunday.  WATCH:

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Proposing a tax on money that does not exist is the peak of government.   Sure the proposal applies only to billionaires who have massive gains in their stock portfolios, but billionaires are not esoteric titles.  Billionaires are people who can, if needed, move their physical location and avoid any U.S. tax on their wealth.

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This evening Senator Josh Hawley released an email (via Twitter) showing the evacuation guidelines given by the administration to the U.S. officials on the ground in Kabul Afghanistan.  The email details quoted instructions to Gregory A Floyd from someone in the administration speaking on behalf of Joe Biden.

As noted by Hawley: “This email was shared w/ me by an American official present in Afghanistan during the evacuation who was shocked by Administration’s failure to vet Afghans before they were evacuated. Email details orders from Joe Biden to fill up the planes – even without vetting:”

Team,

President Biden phoned Ambassador Wilson with the following directive about who to clear to board evacuation flights.

 “1. Anyone with a valid form of ID should be given permission to go on a plane if that person plausibly falls into the categories we will evacuate: U.S. citizens and LPRs plus their immediate families, LES plus their immediate families, those entitled to an SIV, and Afghans at risk.

2.  Families including women and children should be allowed through and held to fill out planes.

3.  Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available.  Err on the side of excess.”

This guidance provides clear discretion and direction to fill seats and to provide special consideration for women and children when we have seats. I expect that C17 flight volume will increase.

Thank you.

Greg

The FDA panel has voted 17 to 0 to approve the Pfizer vaccine for 5 to 11-year-olds.  One of the FDA Panelists, Dr. Ruben, outlined his support by saying “We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it. That’s the way it goes.” 

Another panelist noted that 700 young people under the age of 18 have died ‘with‘ COVID, or COVID related symptoms in the past two years.  With the full support of the FDA panel, the large scale rollout of the vaccine in young children will now head to the CDC for final approvals. 

WASHINGTON DC – Vaccine advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration voted 17-0 with one abstention Tuesday to recommend Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in children 5 to 11.

Members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee agreed that the benefits of vaccinating younger children appeared to outweigh the risks, but some members appeared troubled about voting to vaccinate a large population of younger children based on studies of a few thousand.

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There is a great deal of political media time devoted to the Virginia gubernatorial election that takes place next week.  There is also a major disconnect in the analysis of Virginia politics and what takes place there, so it’s worth pausing and reminding everyone about its unique status.

When an event happens in New York City, the scale of media coverage is so disproportionate to the issue it has historically been laughable.  The media are centered in NYC, so the media focus on events in NYC as if the rest of the country cares.  We don’t.  A waterline break in a NYC subway station gets the scale of national media coverage as if Hoover dam collapsed; most Americans just roll their eyes.

However, because of the proximity to Washington DC, and because of where almost all the federal workers inside the DC system live, that same scale of skewed emphasis is also evident in Virginia when it comes to anything political.

Virginia politics is where the UniParty swamp creatures argue among themselves.  In Virginia the elites in the DNC club debate their high-brow outlooks with the elites in the RNC club.  Virginia is where the traditional DC political establishment of both clubs gather socially to pontificate about their importance in the world of everything political.

Is the whole state like this?  No.  However, the DC beltway is so influential and so populous the other parts of the state are essentially irrelevant to election outcomes.

As the U.S. federal government grew, so too did the swamp physically expand to make room for all the high-minded bureaucrats who run the machine.  Northern and Eastern Virginia were taken over and absorbed into the swamp, the rest of Virginia was cast into the role of Oliver asking for a bit more soup.

When Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were talking about smelly WalMart people, they were really just encapsulating the reality that exists in Virginia, elites -vs- proles, they were not lying; they just said the accepted quiet part out loud and a lot more people saw it, that’s all.

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The goal of the leftist group who organized and coordinated the sequence of events behind Frances Haugen is becoming increasingly obvious.  Ms. Haugen first surfaced during a CBS 60-minutes episode where she promoted the idea that government needed to intervene in the Facebook censorship process because the content of speech was not being limited enough.  Ms. Haugen advocated for government intervention to enhance Big Tech censorship.

48 hours later, Haugen was testifying before congress.  That should have triggered all alarm bells that far-left political operatives were organizing an advanced censorship campaign to stop speech they deemed as detrimental to their interests.  That speech consists of any speech that does not comply with the leftist world view.   Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Ms. Haugen is represented by the same legal group, and group of Lawfare lawyers, who supported Hillary Clinton. 

It is clear the psychologically unstable uptalker, and those behind her, have an interest in having left-wing politicians intercede in global speech to advance their ideological interests.  To further showcase this point, Ms. Haugen appeared today before the U.K. Parliament, again advocating that any speech against globalism and big government is considered extremist speech that much be blocked.  WATCH:

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In the periphery, you might notice that Barack Obama recently gave a speech in Virginia where he also talked about political opposition and “right-wing media” advocating for extremism and stirring up anger.  This follows another highly visible data point where the DOJ has instructed the FBI to consider parents who confront school board policy as extremists.

Keep in mind, this testimony and angle of attack from the political operatives is coming at the same time the U.S. House of Representatives is using the January 6th Commission to advance the same proposition; that all speech against government is considered extremist and violent.

There’s no doubt all of these different approaches are part of the EXACT same coordinated effort.  There is a larger narrative being advanced by the U.S-centered group of Chicago Marxists.   Keep a look out for innocuous things that might look different when viewed through this baseline prism.

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… That concern is now evident.  As if, it wasn’t before.   The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) highlights, in a single marketing and branding snapshot today [Tweet Link], that cultural politics is the underlying ideological premise behind their policy.   The CDC fundamental mission is not about science, it’s about something else.

These are marketing and branding decisions made by institutional officials inside the top tiers of the organization itself.  In the middle of a pandemic, where a large portion of population has questions about how the CDC politicizes science, this vaccine marketing example passes all layers of approval from within the institution. 

When an organization shows you their priority, accept it.

Beyond the hypocrisy leftists are known for; in this example pregnancy now highlighted as an actual human baby, which is a cornerstone the same cultural leftists deny; the message being transmitted in their marketing is: yes, cultural politics drives our public health policy.

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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the most adored leader amid global leftists.  She is worshiped and praised by leftists, globalists, socialists and those who love big government around the world.  Arden is unapologetic in her views that government should rule the citizens.

Recently, the mad queen of smiley-faced fascism was asked if her national vaccination mandate was intended to create two classes of citizens in New Zealand, vaccinated and unvaccinated.  The Prime Minister did not flinch before gleefully exclaiming that is entirely her objective, “Yup, that’s exactly what it is, yep.”   WATCH:

https://youtu.be/17PZ1MvgDTM

The government of New Zealand acts like COVID-19 is a raging swarm of dragons circling the country waiting to snatch people out of their safe places. 

Worse still, apparently most of the country believes the panic and fear that has been pushed, and they tremble with cowed obedience to the regime.

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Emerald Robinson has detailed a court filing in Colorado against Dominion Election Services. [Full Article Here] Within the filing there are some very interesting details worth reviewing:

…”[Dominion] has not waged its Lawfare campaign as only a corporate citizen, but also as a state–actor, i.e., the government. OVS is a state–actor because States across the United States have outsourced their constitutional obligation to run elections by deferring to [Dominion’s] professional experience and contracting out the administration, collection, counting, recording, and auditing of ballot results through voting technology, software, and thousands of hours of technical and election services.

For example, Georgia paid [Dominion] roughly $90,000,000 for a complete, end–to–end election solution in their Master Solution contract. In the Master Solution, Georgia specifically stated “[t]he unique abilities, knowledge, and skills of [Dominion] constitute a material inducement for State entering into this Agreement.” Such reliance and partnership between [Dominion] and States, according to which [Dominion] itself takes the place of the government, makes [Dominion’s] conduct of elections and all its related activities a state-action. The administration, collection, counting, recording, and auditing of ballot results in elections are inherently a traditional, exclusive public function. So not only have these Americans received Letters from a corporate citizen with tens of millions in annual revenue and private equity support, but they have also been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.”  (read more)

In a rare act of journalism, NBC actually followed up on the October 13th grand proclamation of Joe Biden to speed up California ports.  What they found is exactly what everyone suspected, the grand prose from the White House was a political pantomime – absolutely nothing has changed.  WATCH:

As noted, and as previously outlined, the issues with the backlog of the California ports have absolutely nothing to do with rapid unloading of ships and container vessels.  The issue is the inability of California truckers to move those containers.  The problem is a shortage of CA emission compliant internal transportation trucks to move the containers out of the port and into the U.S. mainland.

As a result… the politically expedient goal to get rid of the optical problem (the ships) by offloading containers into a California port system, that is already overwhelmed with tens-of-thousands of containers, is only making the original issue exponentially worse.  More people are now starting to understand the internal issue that has been created by recent California laws, rules and regulations.

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine has a solid outline of the emission compliance issues and the problem of independent truckers not being able to work in California:

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When the Australian government began beating their citizens in the street for leaving their houses and protesting against severe lockdown rules, I said –somewhat tongue in cheek at the time– to watch Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China) trigger U.N. security council sanctions against the Australian government for human rights abuses.

The point I was making earlier was to highlight a danger.  If Western governments continued to devolve into totalitarian regimes, global autocratic leaders will take the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities created by such open undemocratic hostility toward the principles of freedom.

Putin, Xi and the Mullahs in Iran can easily enlarge their global influence if citizens in formerly free democratic nations react to western COVID mandates by rightly and appropriately rebuking their national and regional leadership.

CONSIDER– What population inside a western democracy is going to want to fight Russian or Chinese geopolitical aggression when they view their own national leaders through the same totalitarian prism?

Think about it carefully, because we are at this inflection point.

♦Ex. If China takes military action against Taiwan, and the leaders of France, Germany, the U.K, Australia and the United States want to do something about it, their internal credibility accounts are overdrawn.  Western populations writ large will not support those requests, because the citizens no longer view those leaders through the prism of freedom, liberty and democracy.   This is the current situation.  This is the danger western leaders ignored when they jumped into their totalitarian COVID mindset.

In a clear example of how autocrats can exploit this self-inflicted vulnerability, check out this speech during a plenary session of the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, by Russian President Vladimir Putin (h/t Rebel News):

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