Dec
22
2017

URLs du Jour

2017-12-22

■ Will Proverbs 17:12 put us into an appropriate Christmas spirit? Let's see:

12 Better to meet a bear robbed of her cubs
    than a fool bent on folly.

Well, no. That's not very Christmaslike. And I could quibble: I've never met a bear robbed of her cubs, but I've heard they can be pretty vindictive. Fools bent on folly are usually not immediately dangerous.

Unless they are "public servants". Then, yes, maybe meeting the bear would be a safer option.

■ David Harsanyi wonders if people are really pissed off about getting their taxes cut. Yeah, me too. Democrats Are Fooling Themselves About Tax Reform’s Unpopularity.

Yes, the tax bill is unpopular. Then again, I’m not sure you’ve noticed, everything Washington tries to do is unpopular. Nothing polls well. Not the president. Not congress. Not Democrats. Not legislation. Not even erstwhile popular-vote winning candidates. Certainly a bill being bombarded with hysterical end-of-world claims rarely debunked by the political media is not going to be popular. Republicans won’t pass anything if they wait around for it to be popular. But, funnily enough, they can be somewhat content knowing that voters will probably like it once they find out what’s in it.

David (I call him David) includes this informative tweet:

So, a related, more interesting, question: Will the American people be upset about being lied to by the media?

■ Not that all is wine and roses. @kevinNR notes that the vegetables are on the plate, and one way or the other, they are going to be eaten. A Dessert-First Tax Bill.

The United States is on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory. That does not mean that there is an economic crisis right around the corner, today, tomorrow, or in six months. But if nothing is done, entitlement spending will grow beyond our ability to pay for it, even with substantial future tax increases. Military spending is a heavy contributor to our fiscal burden, too, and it could and should be reduced, but that will first require rethinking our national-security posture and our worldwide military capabilities. For the military, the mission determines the budget, but much of federal spending would be more properly organized the other way around. And as much fun as it is to mock Harry Reid’s federally subsidized cowboy-poetry festivals and the critical national effort to get monkeys high on cocaine, basically all of federal spending goes to a handful of programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national defense, and interest on the debt. Everything else — from the federal highways to staffing the embassies to the FBI — adds up to about 20 cents on the federal spending dollar. If interest rates go up, then debt service could become a radically larger expense — think about an outlay roughly the size of the Department of Defense budget — very quickly.

Another sage observation: "The Growth Fairy will not save us." There's no credible economic model that makes this work out.

■ There's a word that Deirdre Nansen McCloskey dislikes. And, no, it's not moist. No, Deirdre is Against Capitalism.

Capitalism is what the Dutch call a geuzennaam—a word assigned by one's sneering enemies, such as Quaker or Tory or Whig, but later adopted proudly by the victims themselves.

The word is a Marxist coinage. Karl Marx himself never used the word capitalism, but let's not get pedantic: He freely tossed around capitalist to describe the bosses who were busily reinvesting surplus value on top of their original accumulations of capital.

True fact: Capital was around for millennia before "capitalism" came on the stage.

Problem: try to come up with a better single word. I can't.

■ Michael Ramirez on allegations that the Obama Administration unleashed its spooks to spy on the Trump campaign:

Yes, that's two tweets in a single article. But you gotta do what you gotta do.


Last Modified 2018-12-28 5:43 AM EDT