Links for 2/15/18

https://www.ncronline.org/news/politics/links-21518
MGB: Koch has a point, although he does not know it and would not recognize it. It is unfair to him to pay leave when Starbucks does not.  What he gets wrong is that when the private sector cannot guarantee that this happens through the private market, it is up to the government to level the playing field.  Absent a cooperative economy where people behave rightly because it is the human thing as well as the self-interested thing to do, the only justification to not have paid sick leave is some kind of citizen dividend so people can still support their families when they are sick or when their children need them at home.

It is patently unconstitutional to deny aid or use it to enforce immigration policy.  The White House Counsel needs to make it clear to Trump that when you are President, no sometimes means no. Disregard the Trump budget, it is meat for his base.  The real appropriations for FY 2019 have already been passed.  There is no way the entitlement cuts will pass the Senate.

Whelan and Paprocki neither understand American law or the Magisterium. Whelan has an excuse for being a partisan hack.  The bishop does not.  Bishops need to speak truth to power.  Paprocki panders to it, provided it is Republican power.  This particular group of Republicans is particularly suspect, indeed criminal.  Paprocki is a co-conspirator in their idiocy. This is not a USCCB matter. It is for the Nuncio to handle.

Benedict's major accomplishment is Caritas in Varitate, which gives the only correct reason to have teaching on sexuality exist, as a way to justify the rights of the poor to procreate freely and still have a decent income, both at home and abroad.  Sadly, I bet Whelan and Paprocki would rather ignore such a teaching.

Since when is good fact checking a mark of political correctness run amok.  Granted, there is not reason to be upset, but we in the media need to get things right and humbly accept correction and publish fact corrections accordingly.

The problem was the tax cut, not the spending.  The spending increase will suck up the extra money from the tax cut into the bond market (granted, simply increasing taxes would have been better), rather than having the tax cut go into the asset market and fund all kinds of projects in line with Austrian Economic Theories which reward the rich, create an economic bubble and then let a crash happen to see which worthy capitalists survive.  We tried that with the Clinton tech boom and with the Bush housing boom.  We will not have a Trump flirtation with Bitcoin. Sadly, in a few years there will be calls for deficit reduction.  As long as these are met with both defense cuts and tax increases, the economy will be OK.