There's no need to panic.

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"Probably wasn't a good idea." The post “We’re so alike”: The musician Pete Townshend always wanted to work with first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

President Trump, upon departing the White House at the end of his first term, suggested he was already planning his political comeback. He told a gaggle of reporters, “We’ll see each other again.” Yet the event that truly launched Trump’s historic return to the Oval Office was the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence in August of 2022. By then, most Americans knew the Biden administration was failing, but few realized that the regime had weaponized the DOJ in order to persecute its political enemies and their supporters. This alarmed a lot of voters and likely contributed to Trump’s victory. His administration has now launched a much needed delousing of the DOJ. [F]ew voters will be moved by the travails of DOJ goons who raided his home and rummaged through his wife’s underwear drawer. Late last Friday, for example, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the dismissal of about two dozen DOJ prosecutors involved in the interminable J6 investigations, which lasted four years and resulted in the arrests of more than 1,500 Americans — including hundreds who never set foot inside the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Bove also invited eight senior FBI executives to retire or be fired by Monday. These actions came just a few days after Acting Attorney General James McHenry ordered the terminations of a dozen DOJ officials involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of President Trump. Inevitably, these firings produced protests from Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.): We write to you with alarm and profound concern about reports of the administration engaging in the widespread summary firing and involuntary reassignment of excellent career prosecutors and federal agents throughout the Department of Justice (DOJ). This onslaught against effective DOJ civil servants began within hours of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, in complete contradiction of the president’s repeated pledges to maintain a merit-based system for government employment. These American public servants working strenuously to defend the rule of law have been removed from their positions without any evaluation. Raskin hilariously refers to the terminated and reassigned individuals as “non-partisan professionals.” He has conveniently forgotten that it was just such “career prosecutors and federal agents” who did their level best to sabotage President Trump’s first term by launching numerous illegal investigations of the President himself as well as several members of his administration. Moreover, as Jack Smith’s abortive prosecution demonstrated all too clearly, this skullduggery continued for years after Trump had left office in January 2021. This is why Acting Attorney General McHenry has made it abundantly clear that he simply “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” The rapid pace of the Trump administration’s DOJ cleanup is a clear sign that the President and his advisors well remember the lessons they learned the hard way during his first term. When Trump took office in 2017, he knew the swamp had to be drained but didn’t quite grasp how poisonous its denizens really were. The aggressive launch of Trump’s second term indicates that both he and his team have long since been cured of such illusions. Moreover, it’s obvious that the personnel changes implemented at DOJ are intended to dispel the pervasive myth that this agency somehow exists independently from the President. Even a left-leaning expert like former federal prosecutor Elie Honig disputes that in New York Magazine: The Justice Department does not exist in a vacuum or on its own floaty cloud of righteousness outside of the rough business of government and politics. It’s part of our executive branch, as established in Article II of the Constitution, and the American public elected Trump to lead that branch. The preferences and practices of unelected, politically unaccountable career DOJ employees (like I once was) don’t take precedence, even if they’re rooted in good government principles … As much as it can feel cathartic to declare that Trump is “undermining our democracy” with his handling of the Justice Department, that’s not quite right. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution is not one of those ambiguous passages that sometimes appears in the nation’s founding document. No one literate in English can mistake its meaning: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Trump and his appointees have the power to hire and fire federal employees. Nonetheless, Democrat Senators like Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) bray, “Unelected Trump lackeys are carrying out widespread political retribution against our nation’s career law enforcement officials.” This is nonsense, of course, but there is little doubt that there will be legal challenges to the firings. On the other hand, it is unlikely that this is costing the President any sleep. According to a CBS News report, “A majority of Americans [60 percent] are optimistic about the next four years with Donald Trump.” It seems unlikely that disgruntled DOJ prosecutors and FBI officials are going to have much effect on this optimism. Indeed, despite 24/7 media coverage of his long twilight struggle with federal and state prosecutors, the voters returned him to the White House by a decisive margin. Consequently, as long as Trump delivers on the economy and illegal immigration, few voters will be moved by the travails of DOJ goons who raided his home and rummaged through his wife’s underwear drawer. READ MORE from David Catron: Why Democrats Still Defend Illegal Immigration On Monday, We’ll Finally Have a President in Charge The post Trump Fumigates the DOJ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Last week I watched a scene in a new movie I’d waited 20 years to see, which may signal the collapse of Hollywoke. The picture was Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk. The scene was a fight on a plane between Michelle Dockery as a tough Air Marshal named Madolyn and a male thug. Madolyn slugs the thug with everything she’s got. He shrugs it off and gleefully punches her unconscious. I was canceled too by Hollywoke, including some good, I thought, friends, for supporting the same President the first time. It was all very harsh, very realistic, and unlike anything permitted on screen for the entire 21st Century, where women regularly take out large men in feminist fantasy combat. Those films bomb, while Flight Risk was the previous weekend’s number one movie in America. And Gibson is President Trump’s Special Ambassador to Hollywood, along with Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, charged with saving the film-TV industry. I go out to the movies about once a year now. I used to go at least once a week. Last year it was Reagan, an excellent independent feature honoring the greatest President of my lifetime (that may soon change). Modern Hollywood still despises the man, though most of the idiots in charge of it couldn’t even explain why. To paraphrase a famous Reagan quote directed at the Democrats — I didn’t leave the cinema, the cinema left me. When the filmmakers’ left-wing fanaticism and contempt for the traditionalist audience superseded their storytelling ability. As evidence, we need only to contrast this year’s just announced Academy Award nominees for Best Picture with those from 30 years ago. Way back in the 20th Century, a great number of people had either seen every listed film or been well aware of each. The Best Picture contenders in 1995 were Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, and The Shawshank Redemption, all but Robert Redford’s Quiz Show huge box-office winners. This year’s nominees are Conclave, A Complete Unknown, Wicked, Dune: Part Two, Anora, The Substance, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Brutalist, and Emilia Perez, only Wicked and Dune: Part Two legitimate hits. Of the latter group, I just saw Dune on television, and found it a dark, dreary, obligatorily diverse, CGI- bloated adaptation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi classic, far inferior to David Lynch’s visually striking and intellectually stimulating 1984 version, Dune.  I passed on Wicked because I’m a straight white male. But I did read the novel Conclave by Robert Harris, which was well-written, impressively descriptive of the papal succession ritual, and excruciatingly heretical — in other words, perfect for anti-Catholic Hollywoke. The less said about the other depressive selections the better, with several exceptions. The Brutalist is a brutal three and a half hours long yet still defies description (a Jewish friend of mine who liked the picture couldn’t manage it). The Substance tries to make Demi Moore young again when the real original wasn’t so hot. I’m Still Here condemns the Brazilian government’s early 70s right-wing oppression while ignoring its current communist variety. The Nickel Boys uncovers, gasp, racism in the 1960s South. And Emilia Perez is a French musical romp about a “trans-woman” Mexican drug dealer that could have been produced by Max Bialystock but without the Mel Brooks laughs. Few have more insight into the decline and imminent fall of Hollywoke than its artist victims. One of the initial ones was Roseanne Barr, who’d managed the near impossible of resurrecting her hit 90s sitcom into a 2010s one. Until a politically incorrect AKA “racist” 2018 tweet brought the then not quite full force of ABC Disney on her head, canceling her, some thought forever. But Roseanne survived, long enough to see the industry that banned her begin to crumble. And she’s planning a new sitcom with her fellow canceled comedian Michael Richards (Seinfeld). “Hollywood has made itself irrelevant to the American people,” Barr told Variety. “If they want to survive, they should work with the new President. American people elected him in an overwhelming victory. They should get back in touch with [them] and make some money, which I don’t know if they do or not ’cause they’ve proven to be ideologues rather than [business people].” I was canceled too by Hollywoke, including some good, I thought, friends, for supporting the same President the first time. I would like to visit them much like the Ghost of Christmas Present did Scrooge. And I’d ask them one question. “Was it worth it?” Was it worth forsaking a friend in service to a pathological cult? Whose ideology demands infanticide in the name of “women’s reproductive rights,” open borders, police repression, criminal freedom, speech censorship, and the DEI policies in their industry that currently deny them work as white heterosexual men and women? Was it worth voting for a zombie President and an empty pantsuit, and the local politicians who let their city burn? Now, they can only suffer through the celebrations on my side. They can watch — instead of the wretched Oscar ceremony, which they had no part of — the triumphs of our President and his team as they tear down everything they shunned me for opposing. And realizing they’ve become the cultural laughingstocks, and we the cool guys. They can always comfort themselves by walking into a bookstore and picking up a good political thriller, like The Washington Trail by Lou Aguilar, their former pal, just out in paperback. Well, maybe not a Hollywood bookstore. Not yet. They might have to wait for the movie version. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Culture Shock in Trump’s Second Term Can Trump Make Hollywood Great Again? The post As Hollywoke Crumbles appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

February 7 marks the 27th anniversary of the creation of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). As it has often proved to be, MEMRI is a highly valuable tool in our fight against Islamic fascism. They not only translate the words of terrorist leaders … but also translate the sermons of radical Islamist preachers in several countries, including the United States. Aggregating English language news is a huge task, but MEMRI aggregates the news in a number of languages including Arabic, Pashtu, Turkish, and others. When terrorists and Islamic radicals talk, MEMRI listens and translates what they hear into English. They do it quickly and accurately. I first became aware of MEMRI shortly after it began publishing its work. That knowledge was expanded greatly when I began writing my book, In the Words of Our Enemies. I was amazed by the results that my research assistant had obtained in English translations of speeches by Usama bin Laden, Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, many of our other enemies. When I asked her how she got them, she credited about 90 percent to MEMRI. Since then, I have become friends with MEMRI’s founder and president, Yigal Carmon and its executive director, Steve Stalinsky. Their dedication to MEMRI’s task is deep-seated and admirable. MEMRI is an essential resource. Their translations, updated daily, are an essential tool to understanding Islamism and the threat it poses to the West. Now that we have grownups in charge of our government again, I expect they will rely more and more on MEMRI, as will our intelligence agencies. They should. MEMRI bridges the gap between what Arab, Iranian, and Turkish leaders tell their own people in their own languages and the mollifying speeches and statements they use to gull the West. MEMRI’s translations are essential to learning how large that gap really is. MEMRI has an enormous archive in which much of the radicalism of the Muslim world is catalogued. In it, our policy makers can find, among other things, statements of Turkish President Erdogan that prove his nation should be thrown out of NATO. In that archive our new policymakers can also find conclusive proofs that our faux ally, Qatar, has sympathies that are more coincident with those of Hamas, Hizballah, and other terrorists than they are with any democracy. We should, on that basis, move our Al-Udeid airbase (which we share with the Brits) to another country. There is more, much more, that our policymakers — Messrs. Hegseth, Rubio, and Ratcliff — should think hard about and rely on. I asked Carmon how hard it was to get MEMRI going. He said, “In 1998, we had just a handful of people and not even a website. We distributed our earliest reports via fax.” He added: “Today, every time we release something on our website, we send it out to our mailing list and post it on social media so that it reaches an immediate audience of over 500,000 people, not counting shares and reposts.… Our videos have been viewed over 350,000,000 times.” U.S. policy has already been affected by MEMRI. For example, in September 2024, the Justice Department indicted the Hamas terrorist network and six of its leaders for crimes against American citizens in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. That attack left 1,200 dead, and during it, Hamas took over 240 hostages. The indictment included 43 quotes from MEMRI reports and videos. MEMRI’s archive and daily reports contain a wealth of knowledge. They not only translate the words of terrorist leaders in many countries but also translate the sermons of radical Islamist preachers in several countries, including the United States. Reading and watching those from U.S. Islamists is profoundly disturbing. For example, in a Juneteenth celebration, an imam in Alabama preached that the world cannot be saved unless Muslims save it and Muslims should prepare to run the world. There are examples, in the MEMRI archive, of many other states including Michigan, Texas, and California where Islamic preachers said the same, and worse. In an October 2024 report authored by Steve Stalinsky, we found out that Dearborn, Michigan imams in local mosques and Islamic Centers commemorated, held rallies, and held vigils for U.S.-designated terrorist Hizballah leader Nasrallah, top Hizballah commanders, and fighters killed In Lebanon. A Wall Street Journal op-ed, also authored by Stalinsky, hails Dearborn as America’s capital of jihad. As he wrote, in part, “Imams and politicians in the Michigan city side with Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.” He wrote that in Dearborn, “Thousands march in support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Protesters, many with kaffiyehs covering their faces, shout ‘Intifada, intifada,’ ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ and ‘America is a terrorist state.’ Local imams give fiery anti-Semitic sermons. This isn’t the Middle East. It’s the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan.” As his op-ed concluded, this isn’t a Democrat or Republican problem, it’s a significant threat to national security that both need to address. There are hundreds of other examples — all available in the MEMRI archive — of U.S.-based imams preaching anti-U.S. and anti-Israel sermons around the nation. On its 25th anniversary, MEMRI published a video on its global impact. It’s very much worth the seven minutes of our time to watch. MEMRI is more than just a resource. It can and should be used as a weapon against terrorism both here and abroad. Congratulations to MEMRI and all its folks on their 27th anniversary. READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Pity the Media? Our Armed Forces Need Help The post Our Valuable and Indispensable Ally, MEMRI appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Since its founding in the wake of the Holocaust, Israel has been seen by those who love freedom and justice as a “light” unto the nations, an uncanny progenitor of what it means to be brought low and to rise up again from the ashes. If this perception of Israel is true, and I believe that it is, then how Israel now chooses to deal with Islam’s most shamelessly sadistic barbarism may yet set an absolutely necessary example to other nations. The only way to put a stop to such an unequal and immoral exchange, is to institute a death penalty for Jihadi terrorists. After Israel receives the very last living hostages and the very last corpse is set free — it must do the unthinkable: Totally destroy Hamas and remove its active supporters in Gaza, finally take over the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria (i.e. the West Bank), and create a sufficient zone of safety between itself and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Please note I am not suggesting that men like Khaled Abu Toameh or Bassem Eid be ethnically cleansed or exiled.) Israel must try, one last time, as must the Trump administration, to persuade other Muslim countries to grant asylum to the allegedly “innocent” Gazans, perhaps even the type of Gazan who mercilessly mobbed, jeered, and menaced, the sole, lone, young Israeli woman on her way to the Red Cross truck, a woman who’d spent 482 days in solitary, in addition to being starved, deprived of oxygen, sunlight, and medical attention, and who suffered God knows what other abuses. Perhaps other Muslim countries will choose the more “innocent” of Gazans, such as the women who kept the Israeli hostages as food-deprived domestic slaves; or those who were employed by UNRWA and who also starved and hid them — and did God-only-knows what else to them. If Israel obtains a total military victory (as so many other experts far more knowledgeable than myself have long been calling for); if Israel rids itself of the most hate-filled Jihadists, at least those Jihadists who hug its borders, or who function as fifth-columnists within, imagine the example this might set for Europe, the United States, Canada, and India, all countries or regions that are dealing, or will eventually have to deal, with the growing Islamist hatred that Israel has faced for more than half a century. I have long believed that Europe is reaping its karmic destiny. This has not filled me with joy, only sorrow. What I mean is this: For two millennia, Europe persecuted and exterminated its peaceful, productive, and often highly assimilated Semites — the Jews. For a variety of reasons, including greed, guilt, and multiculturalism which functioned as “soft” racism, it has now inherited quite a whirlwind. Europe is now faced with violent, parasitic, and non-productive Islamists, who make up the largest number of pedophile rape traffickers in the UK; who stab, car-ram, behead, and shoot down anti-Islamist dissidents, free thinkers, and civilians (but especially Jews in the UK and France); conduct Jew-hunts in Holland; shoot up Christmas markets and gang-grope large groups of women in Germany and in Sweden; and forcibly veil, forcibly marry, and honor kill their own girls and women — especially those who wish to lead Western lives. In addition, those Europeans whose ancestors came from Muslim countries, especially second and third generation descendants, excel in training and exporting jihadists from Italy, Belgium, the UK, etc. to other European countries — and to join the worst Jihadists abroad in the Middle East and central Asia. Europe has failed to stop this. It has only very rarely deported such Jihadists back to their countries of origin. Yes, I know, this is a treacherously complicated business. Will those countries of origin take them? With what can Europe afford to bribe or threaten them into doing so? And what if the jihadist is a native-born citizen? Imprisoning Jihadists Encourages Hostage Taking Just as Israel must now urgently reconsider its policy of housing, feeding, educating, providing medical and dental care, and allowing five prayer sessions daily to  terrorists with blood on their hands for life — so must European countries. There are so many good arguments against the death penalty, at least in America: the state might end up executing an innocent man; only “marginalized” classes of perpetrators are executed, not the more favored classes; and, the death penalty also turns We, the People into murderers as well. Our tax dollar pays for everything, the years of appeals — up to and including what goes on in the death chamber. But those Jihadists whom Israel jails for life are inevitably going to be exchanged for Israeli civilians, guest workers, and IDF soldiers who’ve been kidnapped and held hostage. The only way to put a stop to such an unequal and immoral exchange, is to institute a death penalty for Jihadi terrorists. Yes, conduct a trial. Yes, consider the evidence. Yes, have a judge or a jury decide a sentence. And if proven guilty — execution, not a life sentence. And yes, if caught in the act — “elimination” on the spot, which is how Israelis now phrase it. America faces a similar problem. The difference is that our actual and potential Jihadist population is much smaller than Europe’s because our Muslim demographic is much smaller. If the reader thinks that I am a “racist Islamophobe” for saying so — please note that I work with Muslim dissidents daily; I’ve conducted four studies about honor killing which has allowed me to submit affidavits on behalf of mainly Muslim or ex-Muslim girls and women in flight from being honor killed and who are petitioning for asylum in America; have co-led a feminist team which, in 2021, rescued 398 girls and women from Afghanistan; and co-founded, together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Yasmine Mohammed, and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, among others, an anti-Islamist Coalition which stands for post-Enlightenment values and practices, for Israel and against Jihad. (READ MORE: ICC Fails Afghan Women. Filmmakers Step In.) Israel, as ever, should lead the way. President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu must strategize a way in which Gaza is emptied of potential and active Jihadists. The problem of dealing with a non-stop and never-ending series of Oct. 7ths should not be Israel’s alone to bear. The world should find ways to eliminate the possibility of such an atrocity ever happening again. The entire world should bear the burden of at least trying to re-educate those who have been lured into violent barbarism. READ MORE from Phyllis Chesler: Whitewashing Leftist and Islamist Jew Hatred Ban Face Masks: Our Safety Requires It   The post For Israel — and the World — Take Off the Gloves appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Like the distant call of a horn announcing the arrival of the cavalry, news broke this week of Trump’s executive order investigating DEI in higher education. It’s a welcome announcement, and I greet it as gladly as any other fair-minded person who has suffered through the malicious drivel of the identity politics found in our classrooms and the woke posters smothering their hallways. The ultimate goal is for students to read “the best that has been thought and said.” But the rot in our educational system goes deeper than DEI. And a thorough revitalizing of the system will require not just tearing out the evil but also replacing it with the good. It’s not just that schools are injecting a poisonous hybrid of neo-Marxist and postmodern ideology into students. They’re also failing to transmit the values of our Western heritage and the intellectual habits necessary for an educated society. Consider the growing trend of the “un-literate,” to borrow Dwight Longenecker’s term. College professors are now encountering students who are technically literate — they know how to read — but are unwilling or unable to put that skill to use. In some cases, students are entering college without ever having been assigned a full book in high school. The prospect of reading an entire book — let alone several of them in the course of a month or week — simply does not compute. It leaves them paralyzed, reaching uneasily for the stress-relieving sedative of the cell phone. Reading rates among adults have plummeted, too — more evidence of an educational system that isn’t instilling even one of the most basic habits of learning and self-development. A 2022 Gallup poll uncovered that Americans now read books at the lowest rate Gallup has ever recorded. As far back as 1985(!) some educators were sounding the alarm on our educational deficit. In spring of that year, Paul Gagnon wrote: Many of our freshmen arrive at college, after 12 years of school (presumably in the “college track”), knowing nothing of the pre-Plymouth past, including the Bible! All too frequently, they have not heard of Aristotle, Aquinas, Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, or Marx. They often know nothing of the deterioration of Athens and Rome, of Czarist Russia and Weimar Germany, and next to nothing of the history of science, technology, industry, of capitalism and socialism, of fascism and Stalinism, of how we found ourselves in two world wars, or even in Vietnam. They have been asked to read very little and to reflect hardly at all. At 18 or 19, they are unarmed for public discourse, their great energy and idealism at the mercy of pop politics and the seven o’clock news. Gagnon’s searing words apply even more today than they did when he wrote them 40 years ago. Does anyone really believe that the caliber of incoming college students has improved since 1985? Considering that today 1 in 3 incoming college students have to take remedial coursework (at significant cost in time and money), I’d say the answer is a resounding “no.” Grade schools and high schools are faring no better. In fact, the deficiencies professors are noting at the college level are the direct result of failures at lower levels of education. A recent Pew Survey found that 82 percent of teachers believe the state of K-12 education has declined over the past five years, and 47 percent of teachers report that their students are bored and unengaged with the material. The survey also reported high levels of disciplinary and mental health issues amongst students. In her analysis of the 2019 National Report Card, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stated, “Every American family needs to open The Nation’s Report Card this year and think about what it means for their child and for our country’s future. The results are, frankly, devastating. This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen…. Two out of three of our nation’s children aren’t proficient readers.” So yes, Donald Trump should absolutely target DEI and tear it out — like a festering, cavity-riddled tooth — from colleges, high schools, and grade schools. But we also need to address the gaping holes we’re seeing in student’s education. We need to quickly reverse the collapse in reading ability and interest. We must teach students not just how to read, but how to love reading. Reading is Fundamental And we need to reintroduce classic texts that transmit the Western heritage and a love of that heritage, the great works of literature and history and philosophy that helped build our civilization. Good books must be introduced early and not dissected with comprehension questions or an avalanche of footnotes, which take the joy out of reading. Teachers should offer some gentle guidance, and ultimately aid the students in perceiving the light contained in the books, without getting in the way or turning reading into busywork. The ultimate goal is for students to read “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, from Aristotle to Austen, but with the proper preparation. That means reading titles from a young age onward such as those found on literature professor and educational theorist John Senior’s “Thousand Good Books.” Such works foster the necessary reading ability and the cultural soil needed for the Great Books to take root in students’ souls — which will reinvigorate our nation’s educational, philosophical, and cultural life from the bottom-up. READ MORE: Blacks Need High Quality Education, Not a DEI Agenda Make America Literate Again   The post First Get Rid of DEI, Then Make Students Read appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The new Trump administration and congressional Republicans are collaborating on a new tax bill that they hope to pass into law by the end of April.  The most important conditions in the prospective bill, by far, will be extending the lower income tax rates and other tax cut provisions set forth in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) enacted in December 2017. This makes 23 states that have rejected the socialist-style graduated income tax that has been in place with the federal government since the Revenue Act of 1913. The TCJA tax cut provisions are set to expire on December 31st this year. Failure to extend them will result in massive tax increases in 2026 for both individuals and corporations resulting in potentially devasting economic consequences. A report produced by the National Association of Manufacturers this month estimates that the expiration of the TCJA tax cuts would result in the loss of 5.9 million American jobs and a $1.1 trillion reduction in U.S. GDP. Fortunately, the entire Republican congressional membership seems united in extending the tax cut provisions of TCJA. However, Republicans need to be careful not to get sidetracked with adding new provisions into the prospective new tax bill to satisfy the selfish interests of individual members. It will only serve to complicate the bill, disrupt political consensus, slow down its enactment, and possibly even derail enactment. President Trump’s ideas for lowering the corporate income tax rate to 15 percent and eliminating income taxes on tips and social security benefits are dynamic and worthy policy proposals. Those add-ons should be included in the bill, but, otherwise, keep passage of the bill as simple as possible. Assuming the Trump administration and congressional Republicans enact a tax bill that extends the fundamental provisions of the TCJA, they should not stop with that legislative achievement; they should subsequently embrace a new political agenda that would fundamentally transform the American economy from one hampered with the labyrinth of socialist policies enacted over the past century to one of restoration to limited government and limited taxation as envisioned by America’s Founding Fathers. The cornerstone of such a new agenda would align with the recent grass-roots movement among various states in the American heartland: the flat tax revolution. Flattening Tax Rates Means Simplifying Taxes In 1996 and 2000, Steve Forbes ran for president on a campaign promoting free market policies, reducing the size and power of government, and, especially, his plan for a simple flat income tax.  As Forbes rightly claimed during his campaigns, a simple flat income tax would eliminate the need for a massive tax enforcement agency, i.e. the IRS.  Forbes often made the wry comment during his campaigns that, if his flat tax policy was implemented, he would be nice to the 100,000-plus employees of the IRS by providing them with paid job training to seek new careers. Unfortunately for free market, libertarian-minded Americans, Forbes lost the Republican primary in 1996 to Bob Dole and in 2000 to George W. Bush. With Forbes’ departure from the national political scene after the 2000 election, the idea of a simple flat income tax seemingly to vanish into oblivion. However, as American taxpayers continued to experience an ever-complicated and burdensome federal tax system, a grass roots movement for a simpler tax system has grown at the state level.   The Tax Foundation, “The State Flat Tax Revolution: Where Things Stand Today,” January 7, 2025. State governments often move quicker in response to the interests of their constituents than the lumbering centralized federal government. Since 2019, seven states have implemented a flat income tax — Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This has increased the number of states with a flat income tax to fourteen. There are also nine states with no income tax — Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. This makes 23 states that have rejected the socialist-style graduated income tax that has been in place with the federal government since the Revenue Act of 1913. The Trump administration and congressional Republicans should capitalize on the flat tax revolution at the state level by pushing for a federal flat income tax once they achieve passage of the currently planned bill to extend the tax cut provisions of TCJA. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on December 30, 2024, Steve Forbes and Steve Moore made the case for enacting a flat income tax of 15 percent for both individuals and corporations.  Excerpts: Making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would be a good start for Congress in 2025. But it’s time to take an even bigger step: creating a simplified flat tax for all. The TCJA got us close to this goal, and a few additional reforms would get it done. Collapsing the personal-income and corporate tax rates to 15% would have huge economic benefits. America would suddenly have one of the lowest tax rates in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of new capital flow and a spike in take-home pay. The simplicity of a flat tax would reduce the deadweight costs associated with tax compliance — and the headaches. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs calculates that Americans spent almost eight billion hours filling out tax forms in 2024. The Tax Foundation estimates that this cost the economy $413 billion in lost productivity, and the Internal Revenue Service estimates that we spent $133 billion on out-of-pocket compliance costs. That adds up to a burden of $546 billion. Mr. Trump has a rare window of opportunity to transform America’s economy into a fast-growing colossus by enacting a simplified flat tax. And we can’t think of a better way to drain the swamp of special-interest lobbyists, IRS agents, and tax lawyers. The benefits of a simple flat income tax would also eliminate the need for the very costly IRS, which has a budget request for the current 2025 fiscal year of $22.8 billion.  As I wrote in my article published in The American Spectator on February 4, 2023, “Abolish the IRS: A Massive System Beyond Repair”: [A] simple flat income tax would provide the necessary political and operational justification for abolishing the IRS. The functions of the current IRS would be reduced enormously, allowing for a simplified tax-collection function to be transferred to a new tax-collection section of the U.S. Treasury Department and requiring a workforce of only a small fraction of the current 80,000-employee IRS. Hopefully, President Trump and congressional Republicans will consider a longer-term plan for a simple flat income tax as they collaborate on extending the current tax cuts of TCJA. READ MORE from Steve Dewey: Overhaul the Financial Regulatory System Mail-in Ballots Wreak Havoc in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Senate Races Steve Dewey is a retired federal financial regulator and founder of GeoFinancial Trends, LLC (www.geofinancialtrends.org) and writes on Substack (stevedewey.substack.com).  He can be reached at steve@geofinancialtrends.org    The post A Flat Income Tax Removes the Need for the IRS appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.