Pun Salad

Here is the pollster Nate Silver:

“Despite the various, very serious threats to American democracy, things would *mostly* be fine if the balance of elected power more closely reflected the popular will (e.g. Senate seats proportional to population, no Electoral College, less gerrymandering).”

Silver is confusing the inability to coerce others with minoritarianism. It is not a serious threat to American democracy that New Yorkers are unable to dictate Oklahoma’s abortion laws. Nor that Texans can’t compel Rhode Islanders to adopt their gun laws. It’s the point.

Elites like to mock the proles when they point out that we don’t live in a democracy. But the system Silver believes problematic tempers divisions. It is the core idea of American governance. If the United States is more divided than it ever has been in modern times, as a New York Times reporter recently claimed, we have even less reason to dispense with the mechanisms and institutions that diffuse power and constrain one side of the divide from lording over the other.

Obamacare's headline promise was contained in the title of the legislation that spawned the program: It was the Affordable Care Act, and it promised to make health care, or at least health insurance, more affordable.

What went mostly unacknowledged by the law's authors and backers was that Obamacare had little if any real mechanisms to bring down the price of health coverage. Instead, it had a system of federally funded subsidies, running about $60 billion annually, which would mask the true price of health insurance by offloading a share of premium costs to taxpayers.

As it turned out, even this system of subsidies was deemed deficient by supporters of the law, including its namesake, President Barack Obama. This April, Obama commemorated the law's anniversary by warning that, in the absence of a subsidy funding boost provided by the American Rescue Plan (ARP), "health-care subsidies aren't where we want them to be, which means that some working families are still having trouble paying for their coverage." The implicit conclusion was hard to miss: The Affordable Care Act, on its own, had not made coverage more affordable.

First, we shouldn’t have so much compassion that we cancel and attack everyone who is deemed a perpetrator. For one, that approach will likely backfire, because it’s only a matter of time before we are all labeled perpetrators. What’s more, canceling people is antithetical to a genuine tolerance of diverse viewpoints.

LGBTQ activists, of all people, should appreciate the value of such tolerance. After all, it was this very tolerance of diversity that allowed them to get as far as they have come. It was free speech—not just as a legal principle, but as a cultural value to be upheld in social and academic platforms—that allowed them to get their ideas into mainstream culture in the first place. It would be incredibly hypocritical for them, having championed free speech as a means of advancing their cause, to suddenly turn their backs on it now that their detractors also have something to say.

Having said that, just as too much compassion can be a problem, it would also be wrong to completely neglect compassion. Just saying “deadnaming doesn’t matter, I’ll say what I want” is a callous approach that spits in the face of those extending tolerance in your direction.

The go-to policy for dealing with nearly every modern problem is more government spending. So it was just a matter of time before Democrats tried to revive the failed "Build Back Better" (BBB) program to address today's economic troubles. Of course, if they succeed, the result will be much the same as what we've experienced over the past 18 months: more debt and rising inflation.

As a reminder, the $2 trillion proposed BBB legislation came on the tail of an oversized $2 trillion third COVID-19 relief bill and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. It was killed when two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined all Republican senators in opposition. They rightfully worried that more spending would inflate our debt and produce inflation. But now, their party is back at it again. In the midst of the largest inflation in four decades, they've been negotiating behind the scenes for weeks in hopes of passing a slimmer BBB.

As a reminder, the $2 trillion proposed BBB legislation came on the tail of an oversized $2 trillion third COVID-19 relief bill and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. It was killed when two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined all Republican senators in opposition. They rightfully worried that more spending would inflate our debt and produce inflation. But now, their party is back at it again. In the midst of the largest inflation in four decades, they've been negotiating behind the scenes for weeks in hopes of passing a slimmer BBB.