May
19
2025

I'm Sure Our Diligent Watchdog Press Will Get Right On This

But was Biden's senility the only thing they were hiding?

You'll want to click over to read Benny's tweet in its entirety.

I don't want to either (a) bore you or (b) gross you out, but I can personally attest that if you are a male of a certain age, doctors pay special attention to that particular gland, sometimes in ways that you might just as soon they didn't.

And, as one urologist cheerfully told me: even if they detect prostate cancer, it's usually slow-moving enough so that something else will kill you first.

But it sounds as if Joe might be an exception? Well, I'm sure we'll be reading and hearing more than we want to about that.

Also of note:

  • And then he started singing Lou Christie's "Two Faces Have I". Speaking of Presidential health woes, the WSJ editorialists note an indication of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Donald Trump Plays Walmart CEO (gifted link).

    Which American politician said the following?

    Item one: “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should . . . EAT THE TARIFFS, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

    Item two: “After causing catastrophic inflation, Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls . . . Her plan is very dangerous because it may sound good politically . . . This is Communist; this is Marxist; this is fascist.”

    If you guessed that both are statements by Donald Trump, you have broken the code on the bizarro world of the President’s second-term economic policies. Last year he blasted Kamala Harris’s proposal for price controls on groceries. But now he is attacking Walmart for warning that it will have to raises prices in the wake of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

    The only sour note here is the bottom line:

    Mr. Trump is trying to duck the political fallout for his misguided tariff policy by blaming everyone else. Americans are too smart to fall for it.

    I'm not sure about that.

  • The good news is that the question is posed in the past tense. Noah Smith wonders: So why *did* U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?

    A week ago I wrote a post arguing that globalization didn’t hollow out the American middle class (as many people believe): [link].

    After I wrote the post, John Lettieri of the Economic Innovation Group wrote a great thread that strongly supports my argument. He showed that the timing of America’s wage stagnation — roughly, 1973 through 1994 — just didn’t line up well with the era of globalization that began with NAFTA in 1994. In fact, American wages started growing again right after NAFTA was passed. Check it out!

    It's a long post that examines various likely and unlikely explanations. But Noah doesn't find any of them particularly believable.

    I'll note that people are still griping about stagnant wages, pretty much ignoring the last thirty years.

  • Don't fight the future. Tyler Cowen observes: Everyone's Using AI To Cheat at School. That's a Good Thing.

    Accurate data is hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that up to 90 percent of college students have used ChatGPT to do their homework. Rather than debating the number, professors and teachers simply ought to assume (and I do) that your students have an invisible, very high-quality helper. As current norms weaken further, more students learn about AI, and the competitive pressures get tougher, I expect the practice to spread to virtually everyone.

    This state of affairs has set off a crisis among educators, parents, and students. There has been a flurry of recent stories capturing how the cheating is done, how hard it is to catch, and how it is wrecking a lot of our educational standards.

    Unlike many people who believe this spells the end of quality American education, I think this crisis is ultimately good news. And not just because I believe American education was already in a profound crisis—the result of ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs.

    That's at the Free Press, and I hope you can figure out a way to read the whole thing. Tyler foresees a radically changed future for higher ed, and he's pretty convincing.

  • Speaking of wretched hives of scum and villainy… The Issues & Insights editorialists say it's time to nuke the site from orbit: Medicaid: End It, Don’t Mend It.

    As soon as Republicans mentioned cutting spending on Medicaid as part of their “reconciliation” bill, the usual suspects started rolling out their standard talking points. They’re cutting health care for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich! Millions will lose coverage! The disabled will suffer! Oh, the humanity!

    Well, if the GOP is going to be accused of destroying Medicaid when all they are proposing is a minor haircut, why not go all out and scrap this hopelessly flawed, fraud-riddled, budget-busting disaster of a program and start over from scratch?

    First, let’s dispense with the claim of “devastating” cuts to Medicaid. The House reconciliation bill would reduce Medicaid spending by $625 billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s stretched out over 10 years, at a time when Medicaid is on track to spend $8.6 trillion. Medicaid spending will still go up every year under the House bill, just a tiny bit more slowly.

    Yes, I know I mixed my SF movie quotes there.

    But I&I is asking this of Republicans. The same party who came into power in 2011 promising to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. With a much larger legislative majority in the House than they do now.