Our Eye Candy du Jour is the graphic that was one part of the spectacular fold-out cover in the current Reason:
(Full size, it's 871x2560 pixels, so please feel free to embiggen, and get even more depressed.)
The associated article is by Brian Riedl, who poses the musical question: Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?.
When President Joe Biden delivered his 2023 State of the Union address, Washington was drowning in a sea of red ink. The annual budget deficit was in the process of doubling from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in a single year due to some student-debt cancellation shenanigans. That year's budget deficit would become the largest share of gross domestic product (GDP) in American history outside of wars and recessions. Economists at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and across the political spectrum warned that continuing to ignore the escalating Social Security and Medicare shortfalls while also opposing new broad-based taxes was unsustainable and could bring a painful debt crisis.
How did the nation's highest elected officials respond to this economic challenge? Biden promised that "if anyone tries to cut Social Security [or] Medicare, I'll stop them. I'll veto it." He also accused congressional Republicans of plotting to reform these programs—prompting outraged shouts from Republicans who resented the accusation of caring about the looming insolvency of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. When the president triumphantly taunted that such boos reveal a new bipartisan consensus to do nothing about Social Security and Medicare shortfalls, both Republicans and Democrats leaped to their feet with thunderous cheers. For good measure, both parties endorsed Biden's prohibition on any new taxes for 95 percent of families. Washington's dangerous borrowing spree would continue with enthusiastic bipartisan support.
Riedl says the only solution is one everybody will hate: spending restraint and tax increases. And that probably won't happen until after a painful fiscal crisis leaves us with no choice.
Sorry to darken your day.
Also of note:
-
Ignorance of economics is no excuse.
Trump: 10% tariffs on everything!
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 15, 2024
Eye rolling economists: That’s, like, the worst policy anyone has proposed in decades.
Biden: Hold my beer. https://t.co/A6kVRiAvPNElection-season "do something" cards played by demagogues.
-
But, hey, what about that J.D. Vance? Kyle Smith sums it up in a short tweet:
The pillars of conservatism are limited government, economic freedom, and the rule of law. JD Vance seems to have contempt for all three.
— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) July 16, 2024If you'd prefer a slightly longer-winded analysis, let's hand the mic to Kevin D. Williamson: The Infinitely Plastic J.D. Vance.
Whatever one makes of Vance as a potential future president, he is nonpareil as a candidate for the vice presidency. He has no legislative record to speak of, and—if we can set aside the fact that he once very publicly held the view that Donald Trump is an amoral lunatic utterly unfit for office—his rhetorical record isn’t much trouble, either. Not that he hasn’t said a lot of outrageous and stupid things. Vance is a Putinist social-media troll who described entitlement reform as a plot to “throw our grandparents into poverty … so that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht.” But nobody takes anything he says seriously—he is so transparently a man who will say whatever his betters require him to say to get what he wants from them. Telling people with money and power what they want to hear is the only consistent throughline in his career, from Hillbilly Elegy to the present day. Once an appendage of Peter Thiel’s, now he is an appendage of Donald Trump’s after a long and bitter apprenticeship of sycophancy.
As another warning signal, Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes that J.D. Vance Thinks Lina Khan Is Doing a Great Job.
Under President Joe Biden, the FTC—headed by Lina Khan—has aggressively pursued an anti-innovation, anti-tech, anti-big business, and anti-consumer agenda. Khan and her allies in the Biden administration think the consumer welfare standard that has guided antitrust law for decades needs to go. Rather than focus on whether a company's actions or a particular merger will raise prices for consumers, they think antitrust regulators should be concerned with some amorphous concept of "competition," with making sure businesses don't get bigger, and with helping competitors to big businesses (especially big tech companies) get a leg up.
Khan's is a profoundly anti-free markets agenda, punctuated by attempts to bypass Congress and the legislative process and simply set policies administratively. Her vision seems to be of an all-powerful FTC able to target business practices and private companies based on partisan political goals, instead of the neutral arbiter of business that it is supposed to be.
J.D. Vance loves it.
"I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job," Vance said in February.
In the likely event you've not been paying attention to what I've posted about Lina over the past few years, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here,… Oh, heck, that's a lot, and I only grepped pre-2023. I am not a Khan fan.
But speaking of non-fans Donald Boudreaux has his collection of Vance barbs from George Will, Stephanie Slade, the WSJ editorialists, and Phil Magness. (The latter seems unavailable, unfortunately.)
-
Feelgood LFOD du Jour. Boston.com reports some impressive local news: A N.H. motorcyclist was clocked at 158 mph, with a passenger on the back, police say.
A 21-year-old Farmington, New Hampshire, man is facing a slew of charges after allegedly driving his motorcycle in the Live Free or Die state at speeds up to 158 mph Sunday, and fleeing from police in the process.
Zachary Dionne was eventually arrested after stopping at a gas station off Portsmouth’s Exit 3 on Interstate 95. He was charged with felony reckless conduct — deadly weapon, reckless driving, making an unsafe lane change, disobeying an officer, resisting arrest, failing to display plates, and having an unregistered vehicle, State Police said.
To quote Mr. David Barry: soon we will have no constitutional rights left.
Recently on the book blog: |