Many in the Washington establishment were shocked Aug. 17, when the Congressional Budget Office reported a surge of "unanticipated tax receipts" that will sharply push down this year's deficit. Those who had been proclaiming the Bush tax rate cuts would result in a big reduction in tax revenues tried to hide their disappointment. It was tough being proved wrong again after having said the same thing when Ronald Reagan cut tax rates in the early 1980s. We have now had three major experiments with tax rate reduction in the last half-century, and each time both economic growth and tax revenues have surged, despite the fears and cries of the anti-tax-cut crowd. How much more evidence will they need to understand the difference between tax rates and tax revenues?

Here I am in Ireland and the last thing in the world I am looking forward to is flying through London Heathrow to get back home.  British intel was tipped off by some good guys inserted by Parvez Musharaff into ISI (Pakistan intel) about a Moslem terrorist plot to blow up airliners flying out of Heathrow to America.  So the security is a nightmare - for everyone, not just Moslems. Thus I was thrilled to hear about The Heroes of Malaga - British passengers on a Monarch Airlines flight from Malaga, Spain to Manchester, England on August 16 who refused to fly until two Moslems were taken off the plane. The liberal British media was horrified.  The London Daily Mail ran a story entitled Asian students' shock at ejection from jet by passenger mutiny.  It is forbidden, you see, to refer to Moslems as such in the British media.  The accepted code word is "Asian" - as if they were Chinese or Japanese, anything but Moslem. The "Asians" complained bitterly they were "humiliated."  So I have a modest proposal to end their humiliation, and increase airport security as well.

It was the summer of 1992.  Our youngest son, Jackson, had been born in May, and I was staying put, not traveling anywhere to remain at home to help take care of him.  A friend of mine named Ray Kline called.  Ray was a legendary intel guy in Washington, having been the Deputy Director of the CIA under John Kennedy, and later Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon). It was Ray Kline who, in the fall of 1962, drove down the George Washington Parkway from Langley CIA headquarters to the White House, entered the Oval Office, and placed the satellite photos of the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba on Kennedy's desk to personally explain them to the President of the United States. That's how the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Ray was calling to tell me about a 30th anniversary conference of the veterans of the Crisis he had just come back from.  The conference was in Havana, Cuba. "You went to Cuba, Ray?" I asked, amazed.  "Jack, the Soviet Union has vanished off the map [December 1991] and a lot of Castro's people are nervous" he replied.  "They are trying to convince him to make his peace with the US.  They even asked me if I knew of a conservative organization that would send a delegation to Havana and talk to them." Ray paused for effect.  "I suggested you and your Freedom Research Foundation." "You've got to be kidding, Ray," was all I could say. "Jack, Cuban intel knows all about how you instigated the Reagan Doctrine, which is why they no longer have their Soviet patron.  Who better than you to go and see if they are for real?" I told him I would think about it.  I decided to go and told my wife, Rebel, my reason:  "I want to look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him that someday the Cuban people will urinate on his grave."  She decided to go with me - in order to prevent me from doing any such thing.

For the past year, there has been a pest on the To The Point User Forums named Miriam Brownlee.  She enjoys driving To The Point members around the bend with her Buchananite anti-Bush anti-Israel conspiracy theories. I have tolerated  her until last week when she lost it and called TTP contributor Jack Kelly a Nazi for revealing the staged Hezbollah photos of the phony Qana "massacre." I am happy to report that Miriam's annual subscription expires this Saturday, August 12 and will not be renewed.  Due to the complete inappropriateness of her comments last week, she will not be allowed to post to the User Forum this week. So Miriam will have to find some other site to pester.  TTP Members can now enjoy the User Forums without having to be subjected to her any longer.  Adios, Miriam!

Miami. The skyline appears to have more cranes than buildings, as if the city were just one vast construction site, and that has been the good news. The bad news here in Miami, as well as most major U.S. cities, is that the real estate boom of the last few years is coming to an end. The villain in this drama is the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed), which fueled the boom and now is destroying it. The Fed, by its own admission, has been failing to keep inflation within its own targets. Yet, the Fed's main responsibility is to provide the U.S. with a sound currency; one that neither loses value (inflation), nor gains value (deflation). The Fed has a long history of reacting too late, then overreacting, to the inflation or deflation it causes. One reason the Fed keeps failing is its overreliance on lagging indicators of inflation, such as the well-known consumer price index (CPI).

If you knew the U.S. government was going bankrupt primarily because of spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the only solutions were the following, which one would you pick? (1) Doubling individual and corporate income tax rates. (2) Immediately cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits by two-thirds. (3) Immediately cutting all federal discretionary spending (including defense) by 143 percent. (4) Reforming Social Security and Medicare by moving from the current defined benefit plans to a program of individual investment accounts, like the current 401(k) and Medical Savings Account (MSA) plans. Many leading economists of the political right and left have concluded the U.S. government will not be able to pay its creditors, including its current and future retirees, the full value of promised benefits, unless current policies are radically changed. So we must choose.

Does the language you speak or use help influence how wealthy you are? When trying to determine why some countries are wealthier than others, economists rarely, if at all, consider language. However, if you look at the list of wealthiest countries on a per capita income basis, you will notice all but three of the top 20 are English-speaking, or use some other Germanic language.   Is there something about the English language itself that helps make one wealthier, and is there something about the Arabic language itself that inhibits economic development?

Since we launched To The Point at the end of March, 2003, we have issued the TTP Weekly Report every single week for the last three+ years.  I'm really proud of that and have every intention of continuing this record. It's going to be challenging to do so this summer, so here we go with an experiment.  I haven't been stuck in DC for these past three years straight, but wherever I wandered off to in the world during that time, it's been for a short while, like a couple of weeks or so here and there. This summer is different, for I'll be out of the country for all of July and August.  Sometimes I'll be in places where there will be an Internet connection, and sometimes not.  Wherever I'm in the former, you'll hear from me - but there may be a gap or two when I'm in the latter. The TTP staff will make sure that the Weekly Report gets out in time, and with our brilliant regulars like Joel Wade, Michael Ledeen, Jack Kelly, Neal Asbury, Dagny D'Anconia, and Dennis Turner.  As for me, I'll be providing at least a "sitrep" (situation report) on each country I'm in.  As of now, that will be:  Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Croatia, Montenegro, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Spain.  Plus a surprise or two.

Last month we discussed in Bad News for Hugo how the ugliest man in Mexico right now is Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  By getting voters to think that Lopez Obrador would be a Mexican Chavez if elected president this Sunday (July 2), Felipe Calderon has a chance of beating him. It's a given in most every conservative mind that an Obrador victory would be a disaster for the US, and a Calderon one vastly preferable.  That's because Obrador is an anti-American Marxist and Calderon is a pro-American free market advocate.  It seems a no-brainer to root for Calderon. I, too, will be rooting for Felipe this Sunday.  Regrettably, the odds favor Obrador.  We can hope he loses, but if he wins, we'd better start thinking fast how to turn the danger of his victory into an opportunity. Let's start now.

It was back in October 2004, in Porter At The Pass, that we first discussed the true nature of the CIA:

Most folks think the CIA is a right-wing outfit. It is not. The CIA has been dominated by incompetent left-wing hyper-liberals for years.

You probably have seen the ads about the "net neutrality" bills before Congress, concerning who gets to manage and set fees for access to the Internet. The House of Representatives has just done the right thing by defeating the so-called net neutrality proposals, and the issue is now before the Senate. The "net neutrality" advocates are a strange coalition of leftist political groups hostile to property rights, self-appointed consumer groups totally ignorant of good economics, and a few large business users of the Internet (such as Google) who want the telecom companies to provide them a free ride for their demands for a more robust network. To understand the fight, you need to be aware of the economic interests of the various players.

There are 435 Congresscritters, and choosing who is the biggest jerk among them is not easy, for there is a multitude of choices. Many would opt for John Murtha (D-PA), but he's just the most senile.  That's not a joke - he's age 74 and actually going senile.  In a recent interview with Tim Russert, he thought Okinawa was close to Iraq, so our troops could be "redeployed" there.  Okinawa is 6,000 miles from Iraq. He's reached that stage of senility called second-childhood, where the patient acts increasingly juvenile - like saying the most outrageous things possible in order to get attention, even if they are treasonous and spits on his own military record. Some, of course, would choose anti-American racist screwballs like Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), or Maxine Waters (D-CA).  But they're just bit-player kooks. If you took a vote among the Congress members themselves for the biggest jerk among them, the most likely winner would be James Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

The hit on Zarqawi has been described, quoting Churchill, as "the end of the beginning" towards winning the war in Iraq.  What it and so much else also portends is the beginning of the end for the Democrat Party's dream of regaining power in Congress this November.  Week before last, the Dems were riding high.  Bush's poll numbers were so disastrous Time Magazine ran a cover asking "How low can he go?"  The liberal rag followed this with a cover story on the "massacre" of Haditha.  Nancy Pelosi went on a speaking tour describing what she'll do as House Speaker next January.  Harry Reid told his staff to start planning for when he becomes Senate Majority Leader.  Yep, the Dems had the Republicans on the ropes, and were gleefully acknowledging their impending victory to the cheering crowd - when without warning and out of nowhere, the Pubbies unleash a series of such punishing blows the Dems find themselves stunned, dazed, and on the canvas.