Pun Salad

In short, Maron is exactly the kind of lawyer you’d imagine Legal Aid would put on the cover of its brochures. But today the public defender is filing suit in the Southern District of New York against the organization to which she has dedicated her career. 

The suit, which you can read here, claims that Maron was “discriminated against on the basis of race” by her employer, Legal Aid Society, and her union, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. It claims that both defendants “published knowingly false statements in furtherance of ideological and political motives divorced from the core functions of Ms. Maron’s employment.” In other words: it says she was forced out of her job because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

“None of this would have happened if I just said I loved books like White Fragility, and I’m a fan of Bill de Blasio’s proposals for changing New York City public schools, and I planned to vote for Maya Wiley for mayor. The reason they went after me is because I have a different point of view,” she said.

“Our goal from beginning to end,” [series creator Chris] Nee says, “was to remind us that, first and foremost, civics is a nonpartisan conversation.” Is it? “The Second Amendment,” sings Adam Lambert in the voice of an unidentified Founder, is “the right to bear arms, which were very different back in my day.” Now, I hate to break the news to the producers, but the press also relied on “very different” technology when the Bill of Rights was ratified. As did the government. “Very different” religions dominated America in those days, as well. The Founding generation not only experienced their own technological advances, but many of them demanded these rights be codified lest someone one day say, “Hey, things change.”

One can debate whether the Second Amendment was a mistake. It takes an imaginary Founder, however, to make the case that “unalienable rights” were conditional on the vagaries of progress.

The American Booksellers Association apologized on Wednesday for including a book about the harms that come with allowing gender-confused children to “transition” in their July promotional box.

ABA first labeled Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” as “anti-trans” after receiving backlash on social media. In response, the association apologized for committing the “inexcusable” crime of promoting literature offering an alternative perspective.

“This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA’s ends policies, values, and everything we believe and support,” ABA tweeted. “We apologize to our trans members and to the trans community for this terrible incident and the pain we caused them. We also apologize to the LGBTQIA+ community at large, and to our bookselling community.”

Consider what it means for something to be fully paid for. If I claimed that I had fully paid for my cocktail bar tab, for example, you would probably assume that I had forked over actual money equivalent to the entire tab. Cocktails in. Money out. A more or less straightforward exchange of currency for services.

But for Senate Democrats, it probably means something more like producing an estimate showing that, over the next decade or so, drinking cocktails at this particular bar could generate enough money-making ideas to offset the cost of the drinks…maybe minus food items. The cocktails pay for themselves!

That's perhaps somewhat exaggerated. But it's not entirely off base. For decades, Democrats have lampooned similar logic when applied to tax cuts, opposing the GOP-endorsed supply-side logic that tax cuts "pay for themselves" by increasing economic activity and bringing in greater revenue in the long run. Those supply-side effects are real, but they are typically much smaller than the most enthusiastic partisans have hoped; rarely do they fully offset the revenue loss. (That's not necessarily an argument against tax cuts. It is, however, an argument against assuming that budgets will balance after tax reductions without commensurate spending reductions.)

Every policy wonk will tell you that after you live in Washington long enough, you start seeing the same issues reemerge on a regular basis. Common ones are praise for the magical ability of government spending to help pay for itself during recessions and handwringing over the myth of middle-class stagnation. And when Uncle Sam's coffers are empty, everyone suddenly remembers the so-called tax gap—the difference between the tax revenues Congress expects versus those it actually collects.

So right on cue, calls to reduce the tax gap are back.

After the COVID-19 spending spree, the U.S. budget deficit is even higher than what we've become accustomed to. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and his band of congressional super-spenders are eager to extend many emergency programs, such as paid leave and child benefits, as well as spend a few trillion more on infrastructure and "stimulus."