Pun Salad

The Internal Revenue Service leak of taxpayer returns to left-leaning media outlet ProPublica is a prime example of why Congress should refuse to give the tax agency more money and power. That includes President Biden’s little-noticed but politically consequential plan to put IRS funding on autopilot.

An overlooked part of Mr. Biden’s plan to supercharge the IRS would exclude most of its funding over the next decade from Congress’s annual appropriations. His plan calls for a “dedicated stream of mandatory funds ($72.5 billion over a decade)” that will “provide for a sustained, multi-year commitment to revitalizing the IRS that will give the agency the certainty it needs to rebuild.” By “certainty” Mr. Biden means insulating the agency from accountability to Congress and its power of the purse.

Like so much else in the Biden Presidency, this follows the Elizabeth Warren model. The Massachusetts Senator last month introduced a bill that would nearly triple the annual IRS budget to $31.5 billion, which would be indexed to inflation and come from money “in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated," such as from interest that the Federal Reserve earns from its asset portfolio. This is what Ms. Warren and Democrats did when they created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which gets its funding directly from the Fed.

California's wasteful high-speed rail project is getting a predictable boost under train-loving President Joe Biden. On Thursday, the Biden administration announced it was restoring $929 million in grants that had been revoked by the U.S. Department of Transportation under President Donald Trump.

Trump used the terrible state of the rail project—years behind schedule, billions over budget, and without a realistic plan for actually connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco—as a reason to shut the funding down. His feud with California political leadership certainly played a role in the decision, but the reality is that the entire train project has been an expensive disaster that has lined a bunch of contractors' and consultants' pockets.

New Hampshire U.S. Reps. Annie Kuster and Chris Pappas are backing a $105 billion high-speed rail project for New England, similar to the high-profile – and highly controversial bullet train project currently under construction in California.

High-speed rail advocates make the “if you built it, they will ride” argument, but they aren’t doing it now. As the Boston-based Pioneer Institute pointed out, “MBTA commuter rail ridership declined from 36.13 million in 2012 to 32.14 million in 2018, an 11 percent drop over six years.” And that was before COVID-19 and concerns about social distancing. Commuter rail ridership fell more than 65 percent during the pandemic.

Passenger rail already needs massive taxpayer funding to keep ticket costs competitive, and that’s for rail systems like Amtrak that are far less expensive than the NAR proposal. Despite claims Amtrak is profitable, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute notes that when you account for the revenues from state subidies, Amtrak lost more tham $1 billion in 2019.

The rule of law can be serviceably defined as restricting the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws. Unfortunately, politicians have learned how to subvert the rule of law by laundering their decisions through supine federal bureaucracies that interpret badly-defined laws and regulations to suit the desires of the president and his minions.

The decade-long saga of the Keystone XL oil pipeline is a near-perfect example of how this works. (Don't get me started on arbitrary presidential power to impose tariffs and exercise secret emergency powers.)

Earlier this week, bowing to President Biden's January declaration that its pipeline was not in the U.S.'s national interest, the builder of the pipeline, TC Energy, announced that it was permanently canceling construction of its Keystone pipeline. That project would have transported more than 800,000 barrels of Canadian oil daily to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Here’s a bit of a watershed in American publishing: Social-media commenters are now successfully editing already-published books in order to alter the remarks of fictional characters.

It’s unbelievable, yet true: Best-selling writer Elin Hilderbrand, who writes beach books with titles suggesting upper-middle-class-white-lady luxury, was so cowed by a few posts on Instagram complaining about a passage in one of her books that she agreed to strike the language from future editions.