McCabe didn’t lose his whole pension and other comments
Finance expert: No, McCabe Isn’t Losing His Pension
Media coverage of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s firing played up the angle that he was supposedly losing his pension by being canned before his 50th birthday, and politicians suggested hiring him for a few days just to round out his benefits. But that’s wrong, says Elizabeth Bauer at Forbes. “In fact, the FERS (Federal Employees Retirement System) benefits vest at five years, meaning that benefit accruals cannot be taken away.” So what McCabe lost was the ability to take his pension after age 50 plus “his eligibility to a special top-up in benefit formula.” That’s not nothing, “but it is grossly misleading that various news outlets are giving the general public the impression that he has lost his pension entirely.”
Numbers cruncher: Spring Breakers Hit By Tariffs
Stressed out by the Trump administration’s proposed steel tariffs? Here, have a beer. While you still can, that is: Isai Chavez at e21 delivers the bad news that the tariffs will hit aluminum hard, hurting beer producers gearing up for spring break. “Approximately 11 percent of the cost of manufacturing beer in the United States comes from the production of beer cans. Furthermore, 36 percent of the aluminum found in these cans is imported. Tariffs are detrimental to beer companies because the foreign supplier of aluminum can simply raise its prices in response to the tariff.” Companies seeking to defray the tax costs might lay off workers, or pass on the higher aluminum costs to the consumers. “Neither scenario,” warns Chavez, “is good for students on Spring Break.”
Elections scribe: Dems Need a Message Besides Trump
President Trump “is reshaping the Democratic Party just as rapidly as his own,” writes Charlie Mahtesian at Politico. Dems’ congressional midterm candidates talk of virtually nothing but the president, eschewing policy and regional issues for singleminded “resistance.” After reviewing ads for dozens of races, Mahtesian concludes that “even by modern midterm campaign standards, much of the language and criticism in these ads is unusually personal.” Though both George W. Bush and Barack Obama elicited plenty of oppositional anger, “they didn’t feature so prominently in the primary season of their first midterm elections.” And while that might be enough for “a primary where the roiling base wants smash-mouth confrontation,” Mahtesian chides, “a more coherent agenda is going to be necessary in the fall as Republicans run on tax cuts and a humming economy.”
From the right: Advertising Isn’t Mind Control
Cambridge Analytica, the data firm hired by the Trump campaign to target online advertising, appears to have misused data by misrepresenting its intended use. “No doubt, this is unethical,” offers National Review’s Jim Geraghty, but it’s not “significantly different from any other form of campaign messaging” and therefore its effect is being blown out of proportion. “At the heart of this is the question of whether a Facebook ad or any kind of clever advertising can get you to do something you otherwise would not do.” The Obama campaign used the same type of data in the same way, albeit without using a company accused of what could be construed as fraud. That’s a key legal difference, Geraghty writes — “but let’s not let the voters off the hook for their choices at the ballot box.”
Conservative take: Both Sides Hate the ‘Deep State’
Concern about the “deep state” — the permanent federal bureaucracy with the power to undermine elected officials or manipulate events from within — isn’t limited to President Trump’s base, fretting over saboteurs. It’s a bipartisan worry, as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey points out, in noting a Monmouth University poll: “Even without the term ‘deep state,’ majorities in all three political categories agree that unelected officials hold too much power in Washington: 59% of both Democrats and Republicans, and 62% of independents. When Monmouth provides a definition that tends toward the conspiratorial, it has a surprising impact on those levels of agreement. They go up, also across the board.” That explains why Trump keeps bringing it up — and why he had so much success as an outsider in the first place: “It resonates with voters who feel disconnected from their government.”
