Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

We know the whole world has gone crazy.

Nowhere has it become more insane than what’s been going on in women’s collegiate and high school sports.

Biological males have been allowed to compete against girls and women in swimming, softball and even weightlifting, which, to people who are not woked out of their minds, is patently unfair to girl and women athletes.

The poster child for how crazy women’s sports have become is Lia Thomas.

Born William Thomas, he identified as a woman in his senior year at Penn, won many women’s collegiate swimming events and became the 2022 NCAA champ in the women’s 500 meter freestyle.

He has been praised by all the usual woke and liberal places for her “courage.”

The liberal media have not complained about the obvious and inherent unfairness of bigger, stronger men being allowed to play against smaller women.

It’s also not a problem women’s locker rooms are being invaded by naked biological men.

Few famous feminists, established women sports stars or women in power in Washington who stress equality for women have spoken out in defense of the young female athletes whose dreams are being unfairly dashed by transgender men after years of training and sacrifice.

One brave exception is former NCAA all-American swimmer Riley Gaines, who tied the 6-foot-1 Thomas in the 200 meters in the NCAA championships last year.

Gaines spoke truth to those cowards in power who’ve sacrificed the basic principle of sports – fair competition – to a destructive and insane political ideology that ruins sports and harms and disrespects women.

“Lia Thomas is not a brave, courageous woman who EARNED a national title,” Gaines tweeted. “He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman. The @ncaa is responsible.”

Incredibly, in 1978 my father foresaw all this gender madness in sports.

In one of the hundreds of weekly radio commentaries he delivered in the late ‘70s, he predicted that a federal court ruling that said it was unconstitutional for male sports and female sports to be kept separate was going to cause problems.

Girls had a right to play against boys, the short-sighted and no doubt un-athletic judge said, even in contact sports like football.

My father saw the obvious – the ruling was against nature and common sense.

Though he admitted it was possible for an “Amazon type” woman to come along and play quarterback like Terry Bradshaw, he said the decision would cause trouble.

Eerily describing the year 2023, he warned it was a “2-way street” that could do fatal harm to women’s sports.

“We presently have girls basketball, softball, soccer and a number of other sports,” my father told listeners on several hundred stations.

“So here comes ‘Joe Muscles,’ 6 foot 4, 225 pounds, who didn’t quite make it on the varsity. He still wants to play basketball and so he plays – on what used to be the all-girls team.

“Since the not-quite-good-enough-Joes undoubtedly outnumber the occasional Amazons who may win a place on the varsity, a lot of girls happily playing on the girls teams could find themselves permanently on the bench.

“You buy a ticket to see the championship girls basketball team do its stuff and five hairy-chested male rejects from the varsity take the floor.

“If you think this is far-fetched—brace yourself.

“In Connecticut Little League, they made the game gender free and in 1976 a team of mostly boys won the “girls” softball championship. A player on the losing all-girls team disappointingly said, ‘They’re so much bigger physically.’

“This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.”

My father didn’t see transgenderism coming – just communism going. But what he foretold would happen in sports is now happening.

We have “hairy-chested” men who cannot compete in men’s sports becoming champions in women’s sports.

It’s all being approved by the wokesters in charge of the culture, and if you disapprove you’re called “a transphobe.”

Well, OK, then. I’m transphobic. But at least I’m not crazy.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Everyone in the national media this week was worrying about whether Donald Trump was going to be arrested in New York.

Not me.

In a radio interview with San Diego talk show host Mark Larson, I said I didn’t care what was going to happen to Trump.

“What I’m really worried about,” I said to my old friend, “is the meeting going on in Moscow between the two most dangerous men in the world – Xi and Putin.”

The head despots of Russia and China were having a meet-up in person to get control of half of the world and what was the president of the United States doing?

He’s getting ready for his first trip to Canada to see that country’s great leader, Justin Trudeau.

People talk about Joe Biden being the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.

But at least Carter was an honorable man. Biden is not honorable about anything – and he isn’t qualified to be the leader of a township Girl Scout troop.

Biden’s weakness shows how important it is for the world to have a strong American president.

To make that point, I like to recount the conversation I had with Margaret Thatcher in June 2004 when my father was buried at his presidential library in Simi Valley.

We happened to be in the same hotel as Lady Thatcher and during breakfast she said, “Michael, think of what we would have accomplished if your dad had been elected in 1976.”

“Lady Thatcher,” I said, “I appreciate that. But had my father been elected in 1976, the Berlin Wall would still be up and the Cold War would be still raging.”

“Why would you say that?” she said.

“Lady Thatcher,” I said, “where were you in 1976? Where were Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Helmut Kohl and Pope John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev? None of you were in power.

“But in 1980, when my father was elected, you all were in places of power or about to be, but you were looking to the USA for strong leadership.”

It took Ronald Reagan to bring all those great European leaders together to make it possible to defeat the Soviet Union, provide the necessary military might and ultimately bring down the Berlin Wall without a shot being fired.

As I told my talk-show friend, there are no Thatchers, Pope John Pauls or Walesas in Europe today – and there’s no President Reagan in Washington, obviously.

So, for example, when the world looked to America for leadership to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine, there was none.

It’s worse than not protecting Ukraine from a Russian invasion, however.

Under Biden’s “leadership” we’ve abdicated our position as the world’s only superpower and we’re allowing a partnership of two tyrannical countries to begin replacing us.

Our so-called Democrat leaders in the White House and Congress are still too obsessed with destroying the future of Donald Trump to care about or challenge the geopolitical threat posed by a Russia-China alliance.

Our military is not just depleted and poorly led under our inept commander-in-chief, it is more concerned with being woke than being strong and prepared.

While Putin and Xi make their evil plans to out-muscle us militarily and economically, Biden’s goal is to make sure there are enough transgenders in the Marines.

The meeting between Xi and Putin this week should put the fear of God in all of us, old and young.

When we were growing up in the 1950s we were terrified of the USSR striking America with its nuclear bombs and missiles.

In school on Fridays we used to have air raid drills and dive under our desks. We laugh about it now.

But it looks like until we get a leader who knows what he’s doing, I better buy an old school desk and teach my grandkids how to dive under it.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Banking must have been next on the to-do list of the things the Biden administration is planning to destroy.

In two years, President Biden and the wrecking crew of crazies, wokesters and career incompetents he has put into his government have screwed up every corner of America.

Everything from the economy and our military to our kitchen gas stoves has already been wrecked or is under threat from the Biden White House.

Even the entire world is in danger, thanks to the wizards in his state department.

They did nothing to deter Putin from invading Ukraine a year ago and now instead of leading the international call for a negotiated peace they are weaponizing and subsidizing Ukraine and risking a nuclear war between us and Russia.

Compared to the possibility of armageddon, maybe the banking crisis isn’t actually that important in the long run.

According to the experts, the sudden death of Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York City this week were not accidents.

They were a predictable result of the Biden administration’s insane multi-trillion-dollar spending spree that spiked inflation to nearly 8 percent, which was followed by the Federal Reserve’s failure to raise the interest rate soon enough to suppress it.

Then, to make matters worse, when the Fed finally did raise interest rates, it did it too quickly.

As one guy on Fox Business described it, the Fed drove the economy at 150 mph – and then slammed on the brakes.

SVB and Signature were big, proudly woke, mismanaged banks whose investment policies were especially vulnerable to the Fed’s quick interest rates hike.

They had too much of their capital reserves locked up in long-term, low interest Treasury bonds, and when interest rates spiked the value of those bonds fell below what the banks had paid for them.

Vidhura Tennekoon, an assistant professor of economics at Indiana University, offered a good explanation of what happened at SVB:

“Customers of SVB were withdrawing their deposits beyond what it could pay using its cash reserves, and so to help meet its obligations the bank decided to sell $21 billion of its securities portfolio at a loss of $1.8 billion. The drain on equity capital led the lender to try to raise over $2 billion in new capital.”

When SVB tried to raise capital to cover its losses it sparked a fatal panic among its upscale depositors – about 90 percent of whom had deposits above $250,000.

The bank went belly up quickly when its depositors realized that their huge deposits – which were insured for only $250,000 by the federal government – were at risk and they began pulling out billions of dollars.

Next thing you know, there’s a national banking crisis and President Biden is on TV playing the hero and saying he’s going to fix everything by using the federal government to insure all of SVB’s deposits, no matter how big.

In other words, all those rich people and companies with their millions on deposit at SVB are to be made whole – i.e., bailed out.

So, as in 2008, the rich will be protected from financial harm by the federal government and middle-class taxpayers will ultimately pay the bill in higher taxes, higher interest rates or higher depositor insurance fees.

Once again we see how the government makes laws that don’t apply to their rich friends: our federal deposit insurance is limited to $250,000 but theirs is now infinity.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for Biden to promise to replenish the money millions of us have lost in our 401(k)’s since he came in and tanked the economy.

I have the feeling I’ll be waiting for a long time.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The poor Democrats trapped in the bloody and broken city of Chicago finally came to their senses.

In their primary election for mayor on Tuesday they gave the boot to their goofy and dangerously woke mayor, Lori Lightfoot.

Unfortunately, when Lightfoot leaves office, Los Angeles, where I live, will have the honor of having the worst mayor in the country – Karen Bass.

Elected only last fall, Bass has already proven she is just as clueless as Lightfoot when it comes to fighting crime and cleaning up a city.

For example, to get more cops to join the depleted ranks of the LAPD, she’s already lowered the physical and mental qualifications.

Now, to bring more diversity and equity to her police force, she wants to lower the standards again.

She apparently hasn’t heard yet what just happened when the Memphis police department lowered its recruiting standards and put diversity above quality – it wound up giving guns and badges to a bunch of thugs who beat a man to death.

Mayor Bass has also made the city’s cops mad at her by telling them they aren’t allowed to wear “Support the Blue” pins on their uniforms.

She’s also tried to get rid of officers she claims are associated “with right-wing domestic extremist organizations.”

Meanwhile, she and her woke administration have done nothing about the population of 69,000 homeless people, crazy people and drug people whose tents make whole blocks of downtown LA unwalkable, filthy and dangerous.

Bass also has done nothing to address the rising crime rate.

Homicides – which spiked to nearly 400 in both 2021 and 2022 because of the effects of COVID lockdowns – are still elevated.

And while violent crime was up only slightly in 2022, there’s been a recent jump in carjackings, car thefts and assaults to go along with the familiar smash-and grabs in malls and sidewalk assaults in Beverly Hills.

Adding to the problems of policing a city of 3.8 million, the police union has just come out with a list of 28 calls for service that it thinks would be handled better by cops or service providers who are not armed.

Their list of exclusions includes ending arguably dumb things like using armed police to respond to calls for parking violations and complaints about loud parties and noisy dogs.

But what will no longer get a response from an armed cop also includes calls for homeless encampment clean-ups, defecating/urinating in public and drinking or using drugs in public – which sounds like some ruined and unsafe neighborhoods are likely to remain.

On top of the problems caused by the city’s woke policies, liberal Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascon continues to make things worse.

His progressive ideas include not prosecuting some minor offenses like drug possession and a cashless bail policy that puts many arrested criminals back on the street right away .

Gascon survived two recall elections, but his woke agenda still seems more important to him than arresting criminals and making streets safer.

The proof is written on a wall in the lobby of the District Attorney’s office:

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office will advance an effective, ethical, and racially equitable system of justice that protects the community, restores victims of crime, and honors the rights of the accused. We are a learning organization that believes in reduced incarceration and punishment except in circumstances in which it is proportional, in the community’s interest, and serves a rehabilitative or restorative purpose.

California is losing population for the first time in its history – and it’s not because of climate change.

It’s because of the woke ideas and policies being pushed by destructive politicians like Mayor Bass and D.A. Gascon.

Life is not going to make a turn for the better in California unless its voters wake up and do to Bass and Gascon what Chicago’s voters did Lori Lightfoot – give them the boot.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Donald Trump and a lot of cameras flew into East Palestine, Ohio, on Wednesday.

Yes, it was a typical Trump photo op. Yes, they were his MAGA people.

The mostly white working-class town on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border has nearly 5,000 souls and about 70 percent of them voted for him in 2020.

But Trump did something for the people of the polluted town on Wednesday that Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg had not yet done – he showed up and showed them he cared.

Whatever you think about his style and personal flaws, Trump did a good thing by forcing the Biden administration to give East Palestine the federal attention it needed and deserved.

The derailment of a freight train carrying dangerous chemicals and the huge fire and mushroom cloud that followed it have made East Palestine the American Chernobyl.

Its residents are still breathing air that may be poisoned, smelling chemicals they can’t pronounce and worrying about their long-term health because of a disaster they didn’t cause but that has wrecked their lives and threatened their futures.

But while President Biden was doing his own photo op this week by making a surprise visit to Ukraine – where the real Chernobyl was – East Palestine’s people were still being short-changed by the federal government.

Their town was getting help from several federal agencies, including the EPA, whose scientists were testing the air inside homes and the soil and sampling the creeks that eventually run to the Ohio River.

But it was not until Thursday — three weeks after the derailment and a day after Trump’s visit – that Pete Buttigieg finally showed up.

Mayor Pete, as the boss of the Department of Transportation, is supposed to be in charge of fixing what’s wrong with our planes, trains, boats and infrastructure.

But until Thursday, Mayor Pete acted like the disaster in East Palestine was just another one of the 1,000 major and minor train derailments that occur in the country every year.

He avoided East Palestine like there was a plague going on there and tweeted something about visiting “when the time is right.”

Mayor Pete is proof that the Biden administration’s trickle-down incompetence starts in the Oval Office and seems to have no end.

But his string of mess-ups have made him the poster boy for what’s wrong with Joe Biden’s hiring policy.

He’s not an expert on anything that has to do with transportation, except maybe bicycle repair or filling potholes in South Bend.

His only qualification for getting his important cabinet position was that he checked the right identity box.

Just as his inept boss Kamala Harris became Biden’s VP solely because she checked two identity boxes, race and gender, Mayor Pete got his important, high-profile job because he was openly gay.

Check.

Biden and his sorry band of wokesters like Mayor Pete worry more about checking identity boxes and implementing divisive, harmful and imprecise things like “diversity, inclusion and equity” programs than improving schools or giving poor parents more school choice.

They also are polluting the educational system by pushing false history like the New York Times’ “Project 1619,” which says America was founded to protect slavery, and critical race theory, which teaches our school kids to hate America and each other.

It’s no secret Biden and his people hate Trump so much they’d rather hurt him than help the American public.

They’d rather let a massive flood of illegal immigrants sweep the country than keep Trump’s immigration policies intact.

They’d rather divide the American people into political and racial factions that hate each other than reach bipartisan solutions to our important problems.

In two years Biden’s deliberately divisive policies and his sick pursuit of wokeness have blown up or weakened our economy, our border security, our oil industry and our military.

Biden and gang are still trying to blame Donald Trump for the country’s many problems. But they need look in the mirror – and stop checking boxes.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Train wreck.

That’s a perfect way to describe the dismal record of the Biden administration.

We’ve already seen a series of major disasters at home and abroad.

And now we have a literal train wreck in eastern Ohio that is, yet again, exposing how incompetent, laughably dumb and out-of-touch the president and his gang in Washington are.

The derailment of the Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3 started out as a small news item from a Trump corner of Flyover Country.

But it quickly became a major story when it was learned that some of the 38 derailed cars were carrying unpronounceable and unspellable hazardous materials, including tank cars full of cancer-causing vinyl chloride and ethylhexyl acrylate.

Three days later, to avoid a major explosion from the leaking cars, the authorities in charge and the railroad execs made the fateful – and, as we now know, foolish – decision to do a controlled burn of the dangerous chemicals.

The evil mushroom cloud of thick black smoke that formed over the town of 5,000 souls looked like something out of a disaster movie.

But it was real.

As the cloud drifted eastward, it poisoned the air, water and land with a shower of dangerous chemicals that has killed fish and pet chickens, poisoned water wells and scared the heck out of people living downwind in Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

In the last two weeks, what happened in East Palestine has exploded into a major environmental catastrophe that could have long-term health effects on the health of thousands for decades.

But as of Thursday, the president and his bumbling Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, have virtually ignored the derailment and the ongoing environmental calamity.

The president went on TV Thursday afternoon to read a statement to reporters about why we’ve been using jets and $400,000 rockets to shoot down Chinese spy balloons, private weather balloons and other unidentified flying things – and then walked off without answering any questions about anything.

Meanwhile, Mayor Pete, who earlier this week was talking about diversity, inclusion and equity and complaining that construction workers were too white, also has been AWOL on the derailment disaster.

He’s managed only a tweet expressing how he continues “to be concerned” about the impact that the derailment has had on families whose “lives were upended through no fault of their own.”

Reports that Mayor Pete was seen on a bicycle going door-to-door in East Palestine in a hazmat suit to express his deep concern turned out to be fake news.

But that’s exactly what Buttigieg should have been doing the last 10 days.

Instead of hiding wherever it is he’s hiding and blaming the train derailment on a regulatory rule changed by the Trump administration, he should have gone to East Palestine long ago.

Both he and President Biden, who apparently still hasn’t been told about the derailment, should have gone to Ohio together to comfort the local people and promise that the federal government would help with anything they need.

That’s the job the president is supposed to do when there’s a major disaster like this – go to the scene, wrap their arms around the people there, embrace them and comfort them.

President Biden has done none of that. He didn’t even order Buttigieg to take Air Force Two to Ohio.

As for Mayor Pete, instead of having someone on his staff whip up a token tweet of concern, he should have stayed overnight with a local family in East Palestine and been videotaped chugging their tap water – and not in a hazmat suit.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The problem with young people today is no one teaches them history.

If they knew what the East German government did to their Olympic women athletes in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, they might understand why it’s not fair for transgender men to compete against women in sports like swimming, tennis and surfing.

It’s ancient news now, but before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East Germany was arguably the most evil communist country in Western Europe.

It wasn’t just the lack of political, economic and social freedom or the fact that half of your neighbors and relatives worked for the Stasi.

It was also what East Germany’s government did to its athletes – women especially.

In the 1970s and 1980s the country’s women’s swim team dominated the world, breaking most of the women’s records and taking most of the medals at the Olympics.

Everyone knew why its masculine women swimmers were so good – and why many were sprouting facial hair. They were being doped.

From an early age, and mostly without their parents’ consent or knowledge, East German girls were being forced by their trainers to take growth hormones and testosterone, the male sex hormone.

The world sports community united in outrage when it learned what East Germany was doing and eventually the country was stripped of its medals.

Making parallels with East Germany and what’s going on in women’s sports today with transgender athletes is tricky, but I’ll try.

East Germany’s government gave drugs to biological women to make their bodies more like men’s so they could unfairly dominate women’s sporting events and win lots of medals.

In America today, we are giving drugs to biological men that make their bodies more like women’s bodies – and then we let the biological men who identify as women unfairly dominate women’s sporting events and win lots of medals.

The biggest difference between the 1970s and now is that today there is so little outrage in the sports world about how transgender policies are hurting women athletes and making a national joke of women’s sporting events.

Where are the angry male sportscasters or “pundits” in the media?

Few of them have screamed about how absurd and unfair it is to let transgender athletes like Lia Thomas, a 6-4 biological male, “compete” with smaller, weaker and differently built women athletes in the NCAA’s women’s swimming championships.

Where are the noisy feminists? What happened to the idea of sticking up for the equal rights, opportunities and dignity of women?

And, most all, where are the fathers? They should be fiercely defending their daughters, filing lawsuits and demanding that their girls be allowed to compete on equal playing fields – with girls.

Young women who’ve trained all their lives to be great swimmers like NCAA champion Riley Gaines are being disrespected and cheated in the name of wokeness.

Gaines – who says she was forced to share a locker room with Thomas last year and didn’t appreciate what she saw when he casually dropped his pants – has called for the NCAA to at least adopt a policy of separate locker rooms.

That’s way too sensible. And it will never happen because it’d be seen as a cruel insult to transgender athletes.

When it comes to transgenders competing in women’s sports, it’s not a woke country we are living in, it’s an insane one.

Things are so nuts it makes East Germany’s use of drugs and hormones seem almost ahead of its time.

In women’s sports it’s now OK to cheat to beat anyone, as long as you are the right gender and have the right drugs in you.

A comic I saw recently said you can be the 482nd tennis player in the world, and all you have to do is cut off your penis, put on a sports bra, and you can become the No. 1 woman player in the world.

Sadly, that joke would be much funnier if it weren’t true.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The IRS is so kind.

Our most beloved federal agency has delayed until next year a new income-reporting law it has carefully designed to squeeze the last drops of tax revenue out of many of us.

The new IRS rule is aimed at millions of self-employed people and small business people who sell goods or services on places like eBay, drive part-time for Uber or earn income through social media companies like Airbnb.

Right now, the requirement for having to report this kind of side-hustle income to the taxman are transactions where payments exceed $20,000, or more than 200 transactions per year.

But starting in the 2024 tax year, the IRS will tighten the screws on the little guys that make the gig economy go.

Anyone who makes $600 or more selling an old roll-top desk on eBay or working as a free-lance writer for a blog site will be required to report their income to the IRS.

The companies they use to sell their stuff online, like PoshMark, or that they work for, like Uber, also will be required to issue them a 1099-K form and tell the IRS so their income can be taxed.

The new $600 1099-K reporting rule, which also affects all payments over $600 between individuals that are made using third-party payment systems like Venmo or PayPal, was delayed for a year.

How it became law is a perfect example of how our politicians and the federal government operate.

It was buried nearly 200 pages deep in the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which runs to nearly 250 pages of legalistic bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo.

Anyone who read Section 9674 – and few in Congress ever did – would have no clue that the 1099-K reporting requirement was being cut from what it is now – $20,000 – to $600.

The IRS said they pushed the 1099-K changes back to 2024 because wanted to give businesses time to prepare for the changes. Yeah, right.

The delay was really a result of the loud stink raised by people who engage in the gig economy, angry taxpayers and especially the lobbyists of the Internet companies who would now bear all the costs of record keeping.

Of course, unfair and confusing taxes like this new 1099-K rule are the meat and potatoes of the IRS and the politicians in Washington who give it its evil and expanding powers.

All year long, all you hear from the Democrat Party and the liberal media is “We’ve got to tax the rich” or “The rich have to pay their fair share.”

But when it comes down to actually writing the tax laws, what do the politicians who’ve built up our national debt to $32 trillion do?

They usually end up taxing the little fish because there are so many more of them and that’s where the most money is.

The new $600 cutoff rule won’t touch the rich, of course.

The big fish can always hire accountants and lawyers to avoid a tax. Or they can get their political pals in Congress to slip little loopholes into the tax code that get them off the hook to Uncle Sam.

But the new 1099-K rule will hurt the young, the poor, the small business person, the self-employed and the middle class.

They’re the ones who’ll lose income. They’re the ones who’ll have to report the sales of their dad’s old shirt on PoshMark – or be turned into criminals.

The IRS claims the $600 rule will generate $8.4 billion in 10 years for federal coffers – a pittance compared to the trillions Washington spends each year.

It’s on hold until 2024, for now. It’d be nice if we could count on House Republicans to cancel it this year, but don’t count on it.

The way things work in Washington, it won’t surprise me if IRS agents start showing up at our garage sales.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

It’s a stretch, but I think I know the real reason the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

We’ve been told for months that the DOJ ordered a search of Donald Trump’s home in Florida because he was not turning over a bunch of classified documents to the National Archives fast enough.

Supposedly, the ex-president was violating the Presidential Records Act by hoarding boxes of “Top Secret” documents in his game room and Melania’s closet.

But I believe the raid last August at Mar-a-Lago had less to do with Trump than with the failure of President Biden and his administration to help Ukraine win its war with Russia.

It’s only a wild theory, and I have no proof, and it’ll quickly be disproven by the fact-checking industry, but bear with me:

Not long after Putin sent his tanks rolling across Ukraine’s border in February 2022, President Biden suddenly remembered having read some top secret Pentagon documents in 2014, back when he was Obama’s vice president.

The docs were war plans showing exactly how the United States would use economic sanctions and sophisticated military weapons to help Ukraine defeat Russia in the event of a future ground war.

Suspecting Trump had taken the Pentagon’s top-secret “recipe” for victory in Ukraine home to Florida, Biden ordered the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago.

When the war plans weren’t found at Trump’s home, Biden told his personal lawyers to search his own homes, offices and garages to see if the plans were among the classified documents Joe had “borrowed” when he was a senator or vice president.

As we now know, lots of “inadvertently misplaced” top secret material of yet unknown importance has been found on various Biden’s properties and a special counsel is on the case.

The key documents Biden was looking for – the plans for winning in Ukraine and bringing about his administration’s ultimate goal, regime change in Russia – never turned up anywhere.

But Biden was really desperate to locate the Pentagon’s war plans.

He apparently asked former Vice President Mike Pence to check if they were among the classified documents he had “misplaced” in his home in Indiana.

And rumor has it that a “Joe Biden” recently went online and asked Amtrak’s Lost and Found department to look for some documents he may have inadvertently left under a seat in the train car he and son Hunter have taken to Washington together a few hundred times.

OK, folks. Joke’s over.

What our commander in chief has done with his mishandling of classified documents is funny, but the way he has handled the war in Ukraine isn’t.

With his drip, drip, drip policy of providing military support to Ukraine, Biden has proven for two years that he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s doing – or where he’s going.

Remember when he boasted about imposing strict economic sanctions on Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine?

The sanctions were supposed to crush Russia’s oil-and-gas economy, drastically devalue the ruble and create a popular revolt that would force dictator Putin to resign and be replaced by a Georgy Washington.

Well, so far, not so good.

The ruble’s value is virtually the same as it was last February, Russian oil and gas revenues surged last year and Putin apparently is more popular than ever.

Biden is now doing some things he should have done in 2021 to deter Putin from launching his invasion across the border in the first place – sending Patriot anti-missile batteries and high quality American and German tanks to Ukraine.

But it’s too late. He’s already wasted a year and $100 billion we don’t have on defending Ukraine.

Biden has shown he doesn’t know how to run a country at home or overseas. It’s highly unlikely he could pull it off even if he wanted to, but he needs to come up with a negotiated peace plan soon — before we start sending troops over there and Ukraine becomes our next 20-year war.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Is Davos over yet?

Is it safe to turn on our TVs without being scolded by formerly important environmentalists like old Al Gore or creepy young climate warriors like Greta Thunberg?

Not quite.

All the virtuous public talk about stopping climate change, saving the planet and putting the dirty fossil fuel industry out of existence at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland officially won’t end till Friday.

That’s when the political bigshots, billionaires and the media junketeers in bed with them will stop their partying, kiss their favorite $750 an hour sex worker goodbye, hop back on their private jets and pollute their way home.

Davos has become such an obvious pop-up annual hypocrisy fest for the rich and powerful that even Greenpeace has slammed it.

An official of Greenpeace accused the attendees of “ecological hypocrisy” for flying to Davos on more than 1,000 “ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors.”

The highlight at Davos this year so far, in terms of unintended humor anyway, was Gore’s hysterical Doomsday tirade on Wednesday.

Looking like Santa Claus, he ranted and bellowed that because of our failure to properly address man-made global climate change the way he thinks we should, the oceans are boiling, the Earth is on fire and our seas are rising faster than his blood pressure.

Bringing Gore out of mothballs to deliver his awkward and embarrassingly untrue rant was a reminder he is still a climate idiot, not a climate scientist.

It also reminded us that none of the natural disasters that he and the environmental movement have predicted were going to happen for the last 30 years have come true.

You can start in the late 1970s when Newsweek, the mainstream media and the climate experts of the day were scaring us and our kids with predictions about the coming of a harsh, deadly new Ice Age.

But by 1987 global cooling had flipped over to global warming – which, conveniently for politicians like Gore who like as much power as they can get, was caused by mankind and posed a long-term threat to the whole planet.

The climate gurus with their scary computer models and Gore spent the 1990s predicting that unless we drastically cut emissions of CO2 in a decade or two, global warming was going to do horrible things to Mother Earth.

It was going to melt the glaciers covering Greenland, melt the polar ice cap, kill off all the polar bears and cause sea levels to rise so high the streets of Manhattan and Miami would be under 10 feet of water.

It’s now 2023. Everything from forest fires in Montana, droughts in California’s deserts and the decline of daily newspapers is blamed on climate change.

But in case you haven’t noticed, none of those apocalyptic predictions made by Gore and the real climate scientists have come true.

Reality has never stopped environmental zealots like Gore, Thunberg and the Davos crowd, though.

They keep pushing for harsh laws and ‘green’ energy policies that will not “save” the planet from burning up but will actually make both the rich and poor people of the world poorer and less healthy.

The mainstream media didn’t make a big deal out of the idiotic things Gore said at Davos or the hysterical way he said them. But his embarrassing tirade is the perfect symbol for how useless the annual World Economic Forum meet-up has become.

Every year, the world’s so-called elite fly to Switzerland for their big cocktail party, where they yell and pontificate about important things like climate change.

Nothing ever changes, nothing is ever solved, but they keep coming back year after year to do it again.

The good news is, the ecological hypocrisy of the World Economic Forum is over for at least a year.

The best thing the elitists who went to Davos this week can do to help the planet and its people now is to not go back for another 100 years.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.