Can the U.S. Navy Win in a War Against China’s?
A war with China would be a naval war, and the United States Navy is not at all prepared. Long assuming our invulnerability as a navy centered on aircraft carrier strike groups while the nature of warfare changes, we have watched China rapidly develop a navy of far more ships equipped with advanced weaponry that has surpassed our own.
Compounding this mounting disparity, our navy has been plagued by mishaps. Two years ago a fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, a ship designed to land amphibious Marine assaults, burned for five days, so destroying the ship that the Navy decided to decommission it for scrap. The captain of the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was relieved 
USS Theodore Roosevelt entering port at Da Nang, Vietnam.
of command for disputing Navy command's reluctance to evacuate the ship when a Covid-19 outbreak at sea in the spring of 2020 sickened a thousand of the 4,800 crew members and led to one death.
In June 2017, the destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with a commercial vessel near Japan, killing seven U.S. sailors. Two months later, USS John S. McCain collided with a commercial vessel near Singapore, killing 10 American sailors. And there had been other less serious collisions earlier that year that damaged two Navy cruisers.
These occurrences led Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas together with three House representatives to commission a report just released by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery on the "Fighting Culture" of the surface fleet. Based on interviews with 77 active and retired service members of all ranks, it looked for… Read More »
taxes
Biden’s Tax Plan Takes Some Radical Departures
Jul 10 2021
Joe Biden commendably intends for his American Families Plan to be paid for. That requires raising taxes. His plan "doesn't add a single penny to our deficits", is his claim.
The infrastructure plan being worked out in rare cooperation between 22 Republicans and Democrats is another matter. The question of how to pay for their $1.2 trillion "framework" is for another day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has decreed that the 2017 tax cuts under the Trump administration are sacred 
no matter how unpopular they were with the public. The question of where does the money come from prompts vague notions of selling roads to private corporations that would presumably charge tolls, or the fuzzy concept of a federal infrastructure bank. The plan does not even venture to raise the gasoline and diesel tax to what it should be today had it been indexed to inflation back in 1993.
For the American Families Plan no bipartisan deal is possible. It contains greatly expanded entitlements that those on the right consider virtual socialism. It can therefore only be passed by the reconciliation process, which disallows the Senate's filibuster for bills affecting the budget and requires only 51 votes. It is in Families that Mr. Biden and the Democrats will insert the tax hikes to pay for it and reverse what they consider to be the abomination of the 2017 tax cuts that reduced the corporate profits tax by 40% and gave 52.2% of the benefits of the individual tax rate cuts to the top 5th of income earners.
There is no guarantee that the Families Plan will pass even using reconciliation. The Democrats can lose no more than four votes in the House and none in the Senate, yet there again are Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona with…
Read More »
Joe Biden commendably intends for his American Families Plan to be paid for. That requires raising taxes. His plan "doesn't add a single penny to our deficits", is his claim.
The infrastructure plan being worked out in rare cooperation between 22 Republicans and Democrats is another matter. The question of how to pay for their $1.2 trillion "framework" is for another day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has decreed that the 2017 tax cuts under the Trump administration are sacred
no matter how unpopular they were with the public. The question of where does the money come from prompts vague notions of selling roads to private corporations that would presumably charge tolls, or the fuzzy concept of a federal infrastructure bank. The plan does not even venture to raise the gasoline and diesel tax to what it should be today had it been indexed to inflation back in 1993.
For the American Families Plan no bipartisan deal is possible. It contains greatly expanded entitlements that those on the right consider virtual socialism. It can therefore only be passed by the reconciliation process, which disallows the Senate's filibuster for bills affecting the budget and requires only 51 votes. It is in Families that Mr. Biden and the Democrats will insert the tax hikes to pay for it and reverse what they consider to be the abomination of the 2017 tax cuts that reduced the corporate profits tax by 40% and gave 52.2% of the benefits of the individual tax rate cuts to the top 5th of income earners.
There is no guarantee that the Families Plan will pass even using reconciliation. The Democrats can lose no more than four votes in the House and none in the Senate, yet there again are Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona with… Read More »