West Wing Reads: Thank You, Tax Reform

Thank You, Tax Reform “The American economy is a tremendous engine of prosperity when politicians get out of the way, and for proof look no further than Thursday’s report on fourth-quarter growth,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes. “Tax reform and deregulation, take a bow.” Yesterday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers reported that America’s economy achieved 3 percent growth for the first time in 13 years in 2018. Its Chairman, Kevin Hassett, “made these predictions in the heat of the 2017 tax reform debate and was ridiculed by progressive economists . . . But the evidence of the last two years is that deregulation and tax reform spurred private capital investment exactly when a long-in-the-tooth expansion needed it to avoid recession.” Click here to read more. “Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times,” President Donald J. Trump said as he prepared to leave Vietnam following his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un this week. Good for the President, the New York Post editorial board says. “Just what we expected in noting the other day that ‘his history suggests he’s always willing to walk away from a deal that’s not good enough.’”  In USA Today, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL) write that students deserve freedom to choose their education options—and the government’s outdated approach to education too often limits their full potential. That’s why the Administration is putting forward “a historic investment in America’s students: the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act.” These scholarships “would annually give hundreds of thousands of students across the country opportunities to find the right fit for their education.” The New York Police Department has received information that members of the MS-13 gang are “looking to ‘hit’” police officers in certain parts of Long Island “to enhance their credibility within the gang,” Tina Moore and Stephanie Pagones report in the New York Post. “The violent gang, which started on the West Coast and has ties to Central America, has been expanding its brutal activities in New York City recently and has been coming into more frequent contact with the NYPD.” “After the Space Shuttle program concluded in 2011, it appeared that Florida’s Space Coast would turn into a ‘Ghost Coast,’ a graveyard of abandoned dreams . . . But not anymore. Thanks to the combined innovation and ingenuity of private companies and NASA, the United States’ space industry is transitioning from public sector dependence to private sector dominance,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross writes in the Orlando Sentinel.