JEB offers his tax plan

One of the first, maybe the first, to come out with a concrete proposal.  He posted it on the Op Ed page of Wednesday's Wall St Journal.  The "MSM"  (NYT and WaPo) probably won't carry it, but the Journal has four times the circulation of the NYT, and even a bigger lead over WaPo. 
   JEB proposes three personal income tax rates, 10%, 25%, and 28%, 20% on corporate profits, and 100% write off of capital improvements.  All decent ideas.  He proposed closing loopholes although he failed to get  specific and name loopholes.  He is happy to have 15 million people owe no federal income tax.  He will scrap the "alternate minimum tax".  He will increase the standard deduction, expand "earned income tax credit" and retains the charitable contributions deduction.
   Let's give JEB  credit for addressing a real issue, and proposing real reforms.
   However I would do it a little bit differently.  I believe that every one, no matter  how poor, ought to pay some tax, just to let them feel the pain.  It need not be much, 5% would do fine.  But everyone ought to pay something.  The "earned income tax credit" serves to zero out low income people's taxes, so long as they have some children.  The formula and rules for earned income tax credit are so complicated that nobody really understands what's going down.  Was it me, I'd scrap the entire thing, just to simply the tax code.  Set the bottom rate at 5%, and be done with it.
   While we are at it, outlaw all those "worksheets" the IRS puts in the 1040 instructions.  If they cannot state a tax rule in a single sentence of plain English, the rule is too complicated and we should scrap it outright.  Those little worksheets walk the taxpayer thru an indescribably complex rule.  We don't need indescribably complex rules. 
   Close loopholes.  Just about everything on Schedule A is a loophole.  Drop them all, medical, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and the rest.  Set the middle tax bracket at 17%.  After deductions and hassling and rassling and loosing an entire weekend to doing my taxes, I always wound up paying 17% after all the mickey mouse. 

Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B)

This is a proposed US Air Force project. estimated at $80 billion, that Aviation Week thinks is close to contract award to either Boeing-Lockheed-Martin, or Northrup Grumman.  A think tank organized conference talked a lot about it.  One thing they didn't talk about was the mission such an aircraft might perform.  Is it supposed to penetrate Soviet or Chinese air defenses and nuke Moscow or Peiping?  Is it supposed to do maritime patrol in the Atlantic?  Is it supposed to carpet bomb ISIS held places in the Mid East?   Is it supposed to operate against defended airspace? 
   Since Viet Nam, USAF bombing missions have been flown by fighters, with bombs hung under their wings.  It seems to work, and it's not clear to me what the Long Range Strike Bomber could do to justify its $80 billion project cost. 
   The proposed aircraft does not seem all that formidable.  We are talking subsonic, 12,000-20000 pound bomb load and a range of only 2500 miles.  Where as the ancient B52 (still flying) could hoist 70000 pounds of bombs and could range out 4400 miles.  The WWII propeller driven single engine Douglas Skyraider could manage a 20,000 pound bomb load.   So we are talking  about a smallish aircraft with not much range.  Think about tanking in the way in, tanking again on the way out, and if you miss your tanker rendezvous you run out of gas.  That's the way we got the short legged F105 Thunderchiefs (Thuds)  to Hanoi and back. 
   The last successful bomber program USAF managed was the B52 program back 60 years ago.  Since then they did the supersonic B58 Hustler, which although fast, didn't carry enough bomb load to do anything worthwhile unless the bombs were nukes.  And we don't use nukes any more.  There was the B70 Valkyrie, big, supersonic, but never got into production.  Then the B1 Lancer project, supersonic, cool, but very expensive and lacking in range and payload.  And finally the B2 project, successful, good range and payload, really stealthy, but at $1 billion a copy, just too expensive.  They shut down production after building only 25 of them. 
   Given that sorry record, I think it behooves Congress and the MSM to raise some questions about the need for the LRS-B project.
    Consider taking a commercial jumbo airliner, taking out the seats, hanging missiles under the wings.  

It ain't the Hispanic vote that Republicans need

Not like they need the woman's vote. 
Romney lost the woman's vote by 10%.  Women are 50% of the voters.  He lost the Hispanic vote by a bigger percentage, but there are a lot fewer Hispanics than there are woman.  Yet the newsies are forever yakking about the importance of the Hispanic vote, they never talk about the woman's vote, or woman's issues.  In Romney's case, if he had cut Obama's margin among women down to 5%  from 10% he'd be president right now. 
    Aside from coverage of Democrats decrying a "war on women"   I don't hear much about woman's issues.  There was that "Julia" ad explaining how much free stuff the Obama administration is giving away.  That got roundly mocked in the blogosphere.  There was the female George Mason student (name escapes me now) that cried out for free contraceptives.  And now we have the push to defund Planned Parenthood over the fetal organ selling scandal. 
   How do women feel about all this?  I haven't seen any polling.  I'm a guy, and I'm old enough and wise enough to understand the women don't see things the way men do.  And that unless I ask the women, I don't know nothing.  Was I running for president I would do what ever it takes to get the women to vote for me.  It's just I don't really know what that might be.  We have done a lot of evening out in the labor market, in college, and employment and promotion.  I don't see that there is much more that can be done in those areas.
  How do women feel about abortion? Are they for it, agin it, or split 50-50?  Used to be they were split.  Is this still true?  Defunding Planned Parenthood is an anti abortion move.  Will it gain women's votes?  Or loose them?
   Where do Republicans stand on paid maternity leave?  Some companies have it, dunno how many.  Is this an election winning issue?  Obamacare promises to pay for contraceptives, should we support this as we talk about scrapping Obamacare?
    What other issues matter to women?

Looking for a platform? Try Patent Reform

My advice to all those running against Trump.  Offer some ideas, like what you would do if elected.  Trump does this, and it's one of the things that keeps him up in the polls.  Most pols these days go out of their way to avoid speaking out on issues, 'cause once you take a side on an issue, all the voters on the other side of that issue, will never forget or forgive.  The voters on your side, forget and do you no good.
   So, how about an issue that everyone is in favor of?  Sure winner, you get some free media, and you don't make enemies.  What issue might that be?
   Howsabout patent reform.  The current US patent system discourages innovation.  As soon as you bring a new product to market, you get a patent troll suing you for infringing some obscure patent that he, the troll, just happens to hold.  Who can not be in favor of fixing this?  Except for the patent trolls that is.  But there just ain't enough patent trolls in the world to matter. 
  What to do?  First clean up the patent application business.  Right now,  you can get a patent on anything, written as vaguely and as broadly as to be a barn door.  Anything will go thru it.  We ought to not allow any patents on software, nor any patents on "business methods", nor patents on arbitrary arrangements of things, like the QWERTY keyboard or the Morse code.   We should demand a working model of the patented idea.  If you cannot make a working model that works, you don't have a patentable idea.   We should demand that the idea be really new, not "obvious to anyone skilled in the art".   Which means the patent examiner needs to actually contact some of those skilled in the art and see what they think about the pending patent. Especially we should not grant a new patent on a minor change.  I hear big pharma has been granted new patents on existing drugs after they merely changed the size of the pill.
   Then we need to keep the trolls out.  To have the standing to sue for patent infringement, you need to be making and selling product yourself that uses the claimed patent.  You cannot just be a law office with a bunch of vague patents and some mouthy lawyers.  Unless you are actually making something useful, you don't get to sue.
   Any, make patents non transferable.  The patent rights are granted to the inventor, or the inventor's company.  The patent owner can collect royalties on his patent but he may not sell the patent to the trolls. 
  

Whirlwind, The American Revolution by John Ferling

It's just out this year.  It's a good read, Ferling writes well, and he does the footnote thing religiously so it's serious history.  It's got maps which make the story a bunch more understandable.  It tells the standard story of the revolution, no Marxist class warfare riffs, no brand new interpretations of events.  It's the right story, well told.  Ferling picks things up in 1763, right after the French and Indian War.  He goes thru the political buildup for independence.  He shows how it took 12 years to sell the colonists on the idea of kicking out  King George, bidding the British Empire farewell, and giving up their English citizenship.  The breach was egged on by Parliament, which spent those 12 years throwing their weight around and trying to show the Americans who was boss. 
    The British Army was more professional than the Americans, the British could do the Column Left, Halt, Right Face, maneuver to shake a marching column out into a fighting line, and their officers could read the terrain and find unprotected flanks the the green Americans didn't even know existed.
  But when the Americans could pick their spot, get set up, and had a good plan, they fought like tigers and inflicted dreadful casualties on the British.  Bunker Hill. Trenton, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens. all showed how to blow a lot of Redcoats away in very short order.   

EU Refugee Crisis

Refugees from various Mid East and North African disaster areas (Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya ) are pouring into the EU.  No EU country wants to accept any of them.  Nobody in the EU has the stones to deport them back to where they came from.  We are seeing horrendous pictures of dead and dying refugees, little kids dead on beaches, refugees clinging to train track, refridgerator trucks abandoned with the back of the truck full of dead refugees.
  It's a EU problem but we in the US caused the messes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.  And we shirked our responsibility in the case of Syria. 
   None of the Arab Gulf states (Saudi, Qatar, Emirates) wants anything to do with this Muslim, Arabic speaking crowd of refugees. 
   What the EU ought to do, is  take these people in, find them jobs, find them housing, and settle them down.  But the EU cannot find jobs for their existing citizens.  They are running 10% unemployment overall, with pest holes like Greece and Spain running better than 20%.   Any refugees let into an EU country just go on the welfare rolls, which are so big as to crush the EU economy.
   If we could clean up the source countries (Syria Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya) most of the refugees would happily go home.  We had a chance to do just that, not very long ago, but we pulled out and let those countries sink. 

More Fantasy Naval Warfare, Armor

The first serious improvement over wooden sailing warships, was the addition of steam engines and iron armor.  In fact, the vessels were called ironclads.  The first combat test, Hampton Roads in the US Civil War, had ironclad Merrimac engage and sink two traditional broadside wooden Federal warships.  Merrimac's armor made her impervious to Union guns, the cannon balls just bounced off her.  Yankee sailors on the two doomed wooden vessels stood to their guns and kept firing broadsides at Merrimac until their ships sank beneath their feet. 
   Following this success, all future warships carried as much armor as they could float.  As a rule of thumb, it takes as much armor thickness as the gun has bore to keep the shot out.  For instance a 4 inch gun can pierce 4 inches of armor.  US Civil War monitors carried 15 inch guns, which made everyone try for 15 inch armor, right up thru WWII.  Although both guns and armor improved a lot since the 1860's the ratio of armor thickness to gun bore stayed about the same.   Unfortunately, it was impossible to put 15 inches of armor all over a ship, the weight was just too great, the ship could not float that much armor.  So the armor was concentrated over the vitals, engines, guns, and ,magazines, and the rest of the ship was left to absorb hits as best it could.  Aircraft made the problem worse, against ships guns, all you needed was an armor belt along the sides, the decks remained un armored.  To provide deck armor thick enough to keep out aircraft bombs was just never doable.  Which is why battleships were mostly retired after WWII, they were just too vulnerable to bombing. 
   The one exception to the armored ship was the brainchild of Admiral Jackie Fisher, RN.  Fisher wanted a scout vessel, fast enough to locate the German battle line and strong enough to survive the contact.  His solution was a big ship (big ships are faster than small ships) with a battleship class battery of guns, but no armor to save weight and keep the speed up.  They called them battlecruisers.  Trouble is, the captains of battlecruisers had a vessel that looked like a battleship, was as big as a battleship, and the skippers got battleship ideas.  When the four British battlecruisers found the German High Seas fleet, instead of turning around and running, and radioing the enemy position back to Grand Fleet, they formed a battle line and opened fire.  The Germans fired back and sank three out of four battlecruisers in just a few minutes of action.
That diminished interest the the battlecruiser permanently.  The last battlecruiser, HMS Hood, launched after Jutland, lasted until she engaged Bismarck in WWII. A single hit from Bismarck and Hood blew up.