URLs du Jour

2018-12-14

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  • At the Hill, Chris Edwards points out a real problem: Ballooning debt harms our youth, but Trump doesn't care.

    On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump railed against the federal government’s almost $20 trillion of debt, and he boldly promised to eliminate it “over a period of eight years.”

    That would have been nearly impossible, and now that he is president, Trump has changed his mind anyway. Told by his advisors that the soaring debt may generate a crisis years down the road, Trump said bluntly, “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” according to The Daily Beast.

    Sure enough, Trump is acting like the debt is someone else’s problem. Last year’s tax cut increased deficits, the discretionary spending deal earlier this year was a budget buster, and soaring entitlement costs have garnered little interest from the Oval Office.

    Also not caring: many other Republicans, nearly all Democrats, and (most importantly) American voters, who keep electing these people.


  • As we survey the dystopian rubble that used to be the net-neutral Internet, where feral savages roam to plunder the fearful survivors of the FCC-mandated catastrophe… oh, wait: Despite the media’s prophecies of doom a year ago, the internet is alive and well.

    A year ago today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the harmful 2015 internet regulation dubiously titled the “Open Internet Order.”  The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNET, Ars Technica, Recode, The Verge, and advocacy groups such as Free Press and Public Knowledge predictably forecasted apocalyptic consequences to the rollback of the regulation, mischaracterizing the Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO) along the way. CNN declared “the end of the internet as we know it,” and other media outlets said the RIFO was “gutting the rules that protect the internet,” and “that the internet has no oversight.” A year later, the internet is alive and well. The media and pundits are unlikely to issue corrections, but here are some facts to remember.

    That's Roslyn Layton, writing at AEI. The doomsayers will not issue corrections; they've long since moved on to bemoaning other imagined crises.


  • At Reason, Veronique de Rugy asks the musical question: Why Are Conservatives Suddenly Supporting Mandatory Paid Leave?.

    The economy is thriving, unemployment rates are low, and companies that have to compete for quality employees are expanding benefits, including paid time off. That makes this an odd moment for conservatives to shift their position on whether the government should implement a family leave mandate.

    A 2017 working group made up of representatives from the center-left Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute outlined the need for a federal paid family leave law. They point to Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that only 13 percent of private sector workers receive paid leave.

    This number ignores a multitude of paid leave options and other benefits that frequently are provided by employers, however. In a new report, the Cato Institute's Vanessa Brown Calder corrects the record. Citing more comprehensive government metrics, she finds that as of 2008 (the last year for which we have data), as many as 61 percent of women reported having access to some form of paid leave from their employers, up dramatically from 16 percent in the 1960s. Calder notes that even in the absence of a federal policy, the number of new moms who quit working declined "from over 60 percent in 1961 to just over 20 percent in 2008."

    Veronique notes that although the mandate proposals promise future spending cuts, we all know those promises go a-glimmering when it comes time to actually keep them. And experience in "progressive" states like California indicates that when government steps in with mandatory benefits, private companies drop their voluntarily-supplied benefits. Net benefit to employees: zero, but the pols can say they "did something".


  • A provocative post from Jonny Anomaly (apparently his real name) at Fake Nous: The “e” word is the new “f” word. And that "e" word is…

    Plato and Aristotle, Russell and Rawls, Darwin and Galton, Crick and Watson, Haldane and Hamilton. What do they have in common? Apart from being some of the most influential philosophers and biologists of the last few millennia, all of them openly supported some version of eugenics. In other words, all of them have argued that traits are to some degree heritable, and that this fact should influence how and with whom we choose to have children. In a passage that many philosophers quietly skip when they teach distributive justice, John Rawls writes:

    “[Deliberators] want to insure for their descendants the best genetic endowment (assuming their own to be fixed). The pursuit of reasonable policies in this regard is something that earlier generations owe to later ones… Thus over time a society is to take steps at least to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects.” (1971, p. 107).

    The [Deliberators] are those hypothetical social engineers working behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Who knew Rawls was such a Nazi?

    Just kidding, he wasn't. But I can't help but wonder if he would have been able to get away with writing those words today.


  • I am a devoted follower of Titania McGrath on Twitter. Because of things like this:

    She's justly famous for taking progressive identity politics to the logical conclusion. So, naturally, she got in trouble with the Twitter censors. And she got an article about it in Quillette: "I Now Understand How Nelson Mandela Felt".

    My name is Titania McGrath. I am a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. In April of this year, I decided to become more industrious on social media. I was inspired by other activists who had made use of their online platforms in order to spread their message and explain to people why they are wrong about everything.

    This week the powers-that-be at Twitter hit my account with a “permanent suspension” (a semantic contradiction, but then I suppose bigots aren’t known for their grammatical prowess). This was the latest in a series of suspensions, all of which were imposed because I had been too woke. The final straw appeared to be a tweet in which I informed my followers that I would be attending a pro-Brexit march so that I could punch a few UKIP supporters in the name of tolerance.

    I'd confess my undying love for Titania, except that she would reject it as a cisnormative attempt at establishing patriarchal hegemony. (I think I got that right.)


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:53 AM EDT