TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

[W]hat Senator Warren's proposal enjoys in political appeal, it lacks in workability.

Mr. Yang has a very different approach. He proposes implementing a value-added tax and using the revenue to provide every American adult with a universal basic income of $1,000 per month, which he calls a "freedom dividend."

It's easy to see how the Yang proposal would work. Value-added taxes, which are essentially sales taxes, have proven remarkably efficient in many European countries. And the universality of the dividend would make it simple to administer.

The Yang proposal would not only be more workable than the Warren plan, but it would also target those who spend lavishly.

Consider two hypothetical C.E.O.s, each earning $10 million a year. Spendthrift Sam spends all his money living the high life. He drinks expensive wine, drives Ferraris and flies a private jet to extravagant vacations. Frugal Frank lives modestly, saving most of his earnings and accumulating a large nest egg. He plans to leave some of it to his children and grandchildren and the rest to charity.

Ask yourself: Who should pay higher taxes?

The Warren proposal hits the frugal executive hard but leaves the spendthrift without a scratch. The Yang proposal hits the spendthrift hard and takes a smaller bite from the frugal person who has saved his money. If you, like me, think that society could benefit from fewer spendthrifts and more savers, Mr. Yang's proposal makes much more sense than Senator Warren's.

And if the goal is to raise substantial revenue from rich taxpayers to strengthen the social safety net, Mr. Yang's plan is more likely to succeed.

COME HOME, cONSERVATIVES:

With so many ludicrously conflicting conspiracy theories being spread by all sides in the Trump-Ukraine controversy, we should at least be able to agree that the Wall Street Journal news section is a generally neutral, careful, fair-minded source. It doesn't have the conservative, increasingly Trump-apologist bent of the paper's editorial page. It doesn't have the crusading liberal reputation of the New York Times. The Journal is generally sober, reliable, and trustworthy.

Its lead story on Thursday was a model summary, shorn of right-wing excuse-mongering and left-wing bloodlust. Therein, in one concise sentence almost halfway through the article, one finds the nub of the scandal.

To wit: "There is no known precedent for a president to offer his private lawyer and the attorney general to assist a foreign country with an investigation into his own political rival." [...]

Reasonable conservatives and respected newsmen are finally making their voices heard. National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, friendly enough to some of Trump's views that Trump seriously considered appointing him to the Federal Reserve Board, dispassionately analyzed the Ukraine case for Bloomberg and carefully picked apart the "flawed arguments in defense of Trump." He wrote that it takes "willful naiveté" to deny that Trump was pushing a quid pro quo.

Conservative policy wonk Yuval Levin, one of the least histrionic and most thoughtful writers on the right, opines that "the president's behavior seems plainly corrupt on its face," but that "the incoherent jumble of Trump's own mind, backed now with the enormous power of the American presidency, has the capacity to create a real world that doesn't hang together."

Conservative legal favorite Paul Rosenzweig, a Whitewater prosecutor under independent counsel Ken Starr in the 1990s, said: "It seems to me almost impossible not to think that this is a big problem for the president. Instead of being able to say 'No collusion,' he now has to say, 'Yes collusion. Why does it matter?' If the Mueller investigation had revealed that President Trump had had personal conversation with (Russia President) Vladimir Putin and promised him something -- assistance in Syria in exchange for dirt about Hillary Clinton's daughter, Chelsea -- everybody would've said that's collusion, that's conspiracy, that's wrong. That's exactly what happened here."

SUBLIME:

President Trump met on Friday with Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, to discuss how the N.R.A. could provide financial support for the president's defense as he faces political headwinds, including impeachment, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

It was not clear whether Mr. Trump asked Mr. LaPierre for his support, or if the idea was pitched by the N.R.A. But in return for the support, Mr. LaPierre asked that the White House "stop the games" over gun control legislation, people familiar with the meeting said.

Ties between the National Rifle Association and influential Russians were substantial and potentially lucrative enough to render the politically potent gun lobby an "asset" of Russia, according to a Senate Democrat's year-plus investigation. 

More than 4,000 pages of NRA records provided to Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the finance committee, documented deep connections between the beleaguered gun group and Maria Butina, who in December pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a Russian agent without registering with the Justice Department. Wyden's report, released Friday and undertaken without the cooperation of committee Republicans, indicates that greed motivated some NRA officials to engage in the outreach.

Butina also made clear to NRA officials long before their controversial Butina-facilitated December 2015 trip to Moscow that Alexander Torshin, her patron and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was a man with mysterious pull in the Kremlin.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

"Box of Rain." (1970).

What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through...

What do you want me to do, to watch for you while you're sleeping?

Well please don't be surprised, when you find me dreaming, too..

Walk into splintered sunlight

 Inch your way through dead dreams

 to another land

 Maybe you're tired and broken

 Your tongue is twisted

 with words half spoken

 and thoughts unclear

 What do you want me to do

 to do for you to see you through

 A box of rain will ease the pain

 and love will see you through.

Robert Hunter wrote the song for bassist Phil Lesh, to sing to his dying father.

In a rock culture that is often reticent to speak of death (with the exception of late 1950s-early 1960s "dying in car crash" songs), this is a poignant hymn of expectations of mortality.

Because, at the end of life, it is only love that sees us through.

And finally, the greatest - IMHO.

"Ripple" (1970).  Check out this international version - it will move you immeasurably, and will testify to its hymn-like qualities. 

Several years ago, I performed a funeral for a young man who died too young.

He was a Deadhead, and his family requested that I include a Dead song.

There was no contest. Here is "Ripple" in full:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung

Would you hear my voice come through the music

Would you hold it near as it were your own?

 

It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken

Perhaps they're better left unsung


I don't know, don't really care 


Let there be songs to fill the air

 

Ripple in still water


When there is no pebble tossed


Nor wind to blow

Reach out your hand

if your cup be empty


If your cup is full

may it be again


 

Let it be known there is a fountain


That was not made by the hands of men

There is a road, no simple highway


Between the dawn and the dark of night


And if you go no one may follow 


That path is for your steps alone

 

You who choose to lead must follow


But if you fall you fall alone


If you should stand then who's to guide you?


If I knew the way I would take you home.

Playing tunes on a harp unstrung? King David?

Cups that are empty, and might be full again? "My cup runneth over" from Psalm 23?

On my best days, this is what I believe.

When we reach out to each other, it is as if we are reaching out to God. God is the fountain of living waters -- m'kor mayim chayim -- that was not made by the hands of men. There is a repository of love. God is place of rest for our aching, yearning, journeying selves.

And, yes - if I knew the way, I would take you home.

SAME SAME:

"I'm surprised," Phillips told TheWrap's Sharon Waxmann about the gun violence-related criticism of his film. "Isn't it good to have these discussions? Isn't it good to have these discussions about these movies, about violence? Why is that a bad thing if the movie does lead to a discourse about it?"

"I think it's because outrage is a commodity, I think it's something that has been a commodity for a while," he added. "What's outstanding to me in this discourse in this movie is how easily the far-left can sound like the far-right when it suits their agenda. It's really been eye-opening for me."

THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON:

Hunter had heard that, during the primaries, some of Obama's advisers had criticized him to reporters for his earmarking work. Hunter said that he wasn't told by members of the Obama campaign to end his lobbying activities, but that he knew "the writing was on the wall." Hunter told his lobbying clients that he would no longer represent them, and resigned from an unpaid seat on the board of Amtrak, a role for which, Hunter said, the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid had tapped him. "I wanted my father to have a clean slate," Hunter told me. "I didn't want to limit him in any way."

In September, 2008, Hunter launched a boutique consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named for the largest of the Finger Lakes, in New York State, where his mother had grown up. In pitch meetings with prospective clients, Hunter said that he could help small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries. In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator John Kerry's stepson and an heir to the food-company fortune, and Devon Archer, a former Abercrombie & Fitch model who started his finance career at Citibank in Asia and who had been friends with Heinz at Yale. (Heinz and Archer already had a private-equity fund called Rosemont Capital.) Heinz believed that Hunter would share his aversion to entering into business deals that could attract public scrutiny, but over time Hunter and Archer seized opportunities that did not include Heinz, who was less inclined to take risks.

In 2012, Archer and Hunter talked to Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital--and, potentially, capital from other countries--in companies outside China. In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR's board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.

In December, 2013, Vice-President Biden flew to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping. Biden often asked one of his grandchildren to accompany him on his international trips, and he invited Finnegan to come on this one. Hunter told his father that he wanted to join them. According to a Beijing-based BHR representative, Hunter, shortly after arriving in Beijing, on December 4th, helped arrange for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation's hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li had what both parties described as a social meeting. Hunter told me that he didn't understand why anyone would have been concerned about this. "How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?" he said.

Hunter's meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden's advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father's visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter's behavior invited questions about whether he "was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn't done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on." When I asked members of Biden's staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. "Everyone who works for him has been screamed at," a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, "got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It's like you've hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him."

For another venture, Archer travelled to Kiev to pitch investors on a real-estate fund he managed, Rosemont Realty. There, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of Burisma, one of Ukraine's largest natural-gas producers. Zlochevsky had served as ecology minister under the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. After public protests in 2013 and early 2014, the Ukrainian parliament had voted to remove Yanukovych and called for his arrest. Under the new Ukrainian government, authorities in Kiev, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, launched an investigation into whether Zlochevsky had used his cabinet position to grant exploration licenses that benefitted Burisma. (The status of the inquiry is unclear, but no proof of criminal activity has been publicly disclosed. Zlochevsky could not be reached for comment, and Burisma did not respond to queries.) In a related investigation, which was ultimately closed owing to a lack of evidence, British authorities temporarily froze U.K. bank accounts tied to Zlochevsky.

In early 2014, Zlochevsky sought to assemble a high-profile international board to oversee Burisma, telling prospective members that he wanted the company to adopt Western standards of transparency. Among the board members he recruited was a former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had a reputation as a dedicated reformer. In early 2014, at Zlochevsky's suggestion, Kwaśniewski met with Archer in Warsaw and encouraged him to join Burisma's board, arguing that the company was critical to Ukraine's independence from Russia. Archer agreed.

When Archer told Hunter that the board needed advice on how to improve the company's corporate governance, Hunter recommended the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was "of counsel." The firm brought in the investigative agency Nardello & Co. to assess Burisma's history of corruption. Hunter joined Archer on the Burisma board in April, 2014. Three months later, in a draft report to Boies Schiller, Nardello said that it was "unable to identify any information to date regarding any current government investigation into Zlochevsky or Burisma," but cited unnamed sources saying that Zlochevsky could be "vulnerable to investigation for financial crimes" and for "perceived abuse of power."

Vice-President Biden was playing a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine, and took the lead in calling on Kiev to fight rampant corruption. On May 13, 2014, after Hunter's role on the Burisma board was reported in the news, Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson, said that the State Department was not concerned about perceived conflicts of interest, because Hunter was a "private citizen." Hunter told Burisma's management and other board members that he would not be involved in any matters that were connected to the U.S. government or to his father. Kwaśniewski told me, "We never discussed how the Vice-President can help us. Frankly speaking, we didn't need such help."

Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter's role at Burisma had no effect on his father's policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that "Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father's message." The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted "to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden." A former business associate said, "The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that."

In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter's relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration's special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden, but did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board. As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once: "Dad said, 'I hope you know what you are doing,' and I said, 'I do.' " [...]

One of Kathleen's motions contains a reference to "a large diamond" that had come into Hunter's possession. The motion seems to imply that it was one of Hunter's "personal indulgences." When I asked him about it, he told me that he had been given the diamond by the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming, who was trying to make connections in Washington among prominent Democrats and Republicans, and whom he had met in the middle of the divorce. Hunter told me that two associates accompanied him to his first meeting with Ye, in Miami, and that they surprised him by giving Ye a magnum of rare vintage Scotch worth thousands of dollars.

Hunter was on the board of the World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that generates support for the U.N. World Food Programme, and he had hoped that Ye would make a large aid donation. At dinner that night, they discussed the donation, and then the conversation turned to business opportunities. Hunter offered to use his contacts to help identify investment opportunities for Ye's company, CEFC China Energy, in liquefied-natural-gas projects in the United States. After the dinner, Ye sent a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter's hotel room with a card thanking him for their meeting. "I was, like, Oh, my God," Hunter said. (In Kathleen's court motion, the diamond is estimated to be worth eighty thousand dollars. Hunter said he believes the value is closer to ten thousand.) When I asked him if he thought the diamond was intended as a bribe, he said no: "What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn't in office." Hunter said that he gave the diamond to his associates, and doesn't know what they did with it. "I knew it wasn't a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird," he said.

Hunter began negotiating a deal for CEFC to invest forty million dollars in a liquefied-natural-gas project on Monkey Island, in Louisiana, which, he said, was projected to create thousands of jobs. "I was more proud of it than you can imagine," he told me. In the summer of 2017, Ye talked with Hunter about his concern that U.S. law-enforcement agencies were investigating one of his associates, Patrick Ho. Hunter, who sometimes works as a private lawyer, agreed to represent Ho, and tried to figure out whether Ho was in legal jeopardy in the U.S. That November, just after Ye and Hunter agreed on the Monkey Island deal, U.S. authorities detained Ho at the airport. He was later sentenced to three years in prison for his role in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top government officials in Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC. In February, 2018, Ye was detained by Chinese authorities, reportedly as part of an anti-corruption investigation, and the deal with Hunter fell through. Hunter said that he did not consider Ye to be a "shady character at all," and characterized the outcome as "bad luck." [...]

On April 1, 2019, John Solomon, an opinion contributor to The Hill, wrote about Shokin's claim that he had been conducting a corruption probe into Burisma and Hunter when he was dismissed. A month later, the Times reported that Hunter "was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general." The story, by Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, provoked some Democrats to express concern that the Times was again lending credence to allegations made by Schweizer and other Trump allies. Giuliani retweeted the article, and Trump called for the Justice Department to investigate. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Obama, tweeted, "Zero lessons have been learned from 2016: 1. Mainstream outlet credulously accepts Trump conspiracy about opponent 2. Trump propaganda machine uses story to spread the conspiracy on social media and through digital ads 3. Voters believe it, ignoring subsequent fact checks."

There is no credible evidence that Biden sought Shokin's removal in order to protect Hunter. According to Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration's special envoy for energy policy, Shokin was removed because of concerns by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the U.S. government that he wasn't pursuing corruption investigations. Contrary to the assertions that Shokin was fired because he was investigating Burisma and Zlochevsky, Hochstein said, "many of us in the U.S. government believed that Shokin was the one protecting Zlochevsky." In May, Giuliani scheduled a visit to Ukraine, and told the Times that he would look into Hunter's involvement with Burisma, "because that information will be very, very helpful to my client," but then abruptly cancelled the trip, amid reports that Ukraine's President-elect was unwilling to meet with him. A week later, on May 16th, Lutsenko appeared to shift his position on Burisma, telling Bloomberg News that he saw no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son, and that "a company can pay however much it wants to its board." The reasons for his reversal were unclear, but Daria Kaleniuk, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, in Kiev, speculated that Lutsenko, in talking with Giuliani, had been trying to "pump his political muscle," a strategy that had proved ineffective in the new political climate.

That month, Hunter declined Burisma's offer to serve another term on the board, believing that the controversy had become a distraction. 

PWNING THE TRUMPBOTS:

Trump promptly tweeted that "Adam Schiff has zero credibility. Another fantasy to hurt the Republican Party." But Schiff, whose demeanor is as low-key and unruffled as his convictions are fierce, merely smiled at reporters outside the House hearing room and replied, "I'm always flattered when I'm attacked by someone of the president's character."

All along, first as the committee's ranking member and then as chairman since the Democrats won control of the House in last year's midterm elections, Schiff's paramount goal has been simple, as he told me just before Mueller testified to his committee about his final special counsel's report in July.

"It is our hope that we can inform the American people of the full facts, that they can appreciate the degree to which the Russians interfered in a presidential election to help Donald Trump, the degree to which the president welcomed that help, knew it was going on, welcomed it, and then lied about it and covered it up. And the degree to which those actions and his actions since continue to put us at risk, because it encourages the Russians to get involved again."

That Trump himself is now on record as asking for just such sort of help--albeit from Russia's bitter adversary, Ukraine--is a plot line almost too perfect to have been made up. "It's hard to imagine a more serious set of allegations than those contained in the complaint," Schiff told reporters after the hearing, noting that the president's actions involved numerous potential offenses, criminal or otherwise.

Schiff noted a "deep irony" in the contrast between Maguire's initial refusal to forward the whistle-blower's complaint to Congress, as generally required by law, on the grounds that it did not involve actions by the intelligence community, and the whistle-blower's accusation that the record of Trump's call with Zelensky had been stored in a special White House computer system designed to protect the most sensitive intelligence secrets.

He vowed to continue the committee's investigation through the upcoming congressional recess, calling witnesses, including the whistle-blower, as needed. "There is a whole host of people, apparently, who have knowledge of these events," he said, adding that "this whistle-blower has given us a roadmap for our investigation."

"We know what we have to do and, of course, we'll be guided by the evidence that we find along the way," he said.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

As a whistleblower alleged, White House officials ordered the memorandum of the July 25 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky be stored in a separate, secure sever, a senior White House official said Friday. [...]

Trump's allies have again tried to brush off the whistleblower's complaint as inaccurate "hearsay." But just as the whistleblower provided a stunningly accurate description of the call based on secondhand knowledge, this allegation appears to be true as well.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

A main problem with her tax is that the net worth of a rich person isn't as straightforward as proponents of wealth taxes would like you to believe. Net worth includes all assets, some of which are easier to value than others. The value of assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate are pretty easy to measure. But many other assets -- such as cryptocurrencies, trusts, and private businesses -- are harder to assess.

That's why wealth taxes are always so hard to administer and so easy to avoid. It makes them a terrible vehicle for raising money. And it explains why many governments used to have a wealth tax but few still do today. According to a paper by Daniel Bunn of the Tax Foundation, "the number of current OECD members that have collected revenue from net wealth taxes has grown from nine in 1965 to a peak of 14 in 1996 to just four in 2017." He adds that "among those four OECD countries collecting revenues from net wealth taxes, revenues made up just 1.45 percent of total revenues on average in 2017." Yes, it is a difficult tax to collect.

France was one of the four countries that had a wealth tax in 2017, but it dropped the tax in 2018. (Belgium adopted its own wealth tax, meaning that the total number of countries with a wealth tax today is still four.) I would think that if the French government -- of all governments! -- dropped the wealth tax, that should be a powerful clue that the levy isn't all that Warren dreams it will be. But apparently the senator thinks she can avoid any problems by implementing anti-avoidance measures such as a repressive 40 percent exit tax on any targeted household that attempts to emigrate, minimum audit rates, and increased funding for IRS enforcement. Warren clearly doesn't believe in freedom from persecution.

But there are deeper problems with a wealth tax. First, there seems to be a profound misunderstanding of what wealth is and where the money will come from. Listening to politicians who support the levy, you get a sense that rich people use their wealth almost exclusively to fund extravagant consumption. Tax their wealth and these rich people will simply downgrade their houses -- and still be left with gigantic palaces -- or otherwise reduce their unnecessary consumption expenditures.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, that wealth is tied up in other wealth-producing activities. It's invested in companies; it is used to fund R&D that will create better goods and services for consumers; it is the capital that innovators and producers borrow from banks to grow their businesses.

CAN'T REMOVE HIM FAST ENOUGH:

IT'S A RICO CASE:

Trump's unhinged rhetoric has inspired unstable people to take matters into their own hands, including one who is now in prison for sending bombs. The president must be called to account for his abuses of power sooner rather than later, but every decent American left in public life must immediately demand that he stop any further attacks on this whistleblower, before it's too late and there's another star on the wall at Langley.

IT'S NOT THE CRIMES, IT'S THE OTHER CRIMES:

No one bothered to put special limits on the number of people allowed to sit in the "listening room" in the White House to monitor the phone call because it was expected to be routine. By the time the call was over 30 minutes later, it quickly became clear that it was anything but.

Soon after President Trump put the phone down that summer day, the red flags began to go up. Rather than just one head of state offering another pro forma congratulations for recent elections, the call turned into a bid by Mr. Trump to press a Ukrainian leader in need of additional American aid to "do us a favor" and investigate Democrats.

The alarm among officials who heard the exchange led to an extraordinary effort to keep too many more people from learning about it. In the days to come, according to a whistle-blower complaint released on Thursday, White House officials embarked on a campaign to "lock down" the record of the call, removing it from the usual electronic file and hiding it away in a separate system normally used for classified information.