Pun Salad

… what my life would have been like without Brian Wilson. It was only a few days ago that I adapted one of his song titles in a headline. A longtime fan, since my days as a pimply teenager in Omaha. Still remember listening to "Pet Sounds" for the first time with Jeff Gross.

Yes, he could be pretentious and silly, sometimes concurrently. That's OK.

Let me stick in an Eye Candy video, one recommended by Dave Barry:

Sweet. But let's do some words too. There are a lot to choose from, but I will go with Brian Doherty's at Reason: Brian Wilson was an exemplary American.

Rest in peace, Brian.

Also of note:

• LFOD, unless you work for a living. The Center Square reports on the latest report from ALEC: Northeast states get low marks for labor freedoms. And things here in the Granite State are pretty mediocre:

  New Hampshire, the "live free or die" state, didn't fare much better than other New England states, with the report's authors ranking it 34th in the nation for overall labor policies. But the Granite State was ranked in a tie for first in the nation for its $7.25 per hour minimum wage, which is tied to the federal level.

  ALEC is the "American Legislative Exchange Council", and they lean conservatarian. Their own page about their report is here.

  New Hampshire got dinged for not having a right-to-work law, and having a relatively large slice of government employees belonging to unions.

  Still, our 34th place showing was better than Maine (43), Rhode Island (45), Connecticut (46), and Massachusetts (49).

  Still, we got beaten by Vermont (30). Vermont! As in, "People's Republic Of". Come on, we can do better than that.

• I told you I was bored by immigration and rioting. And I still am. So let's ignore Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt headline (Los Angeles Lawmakers Request the LAPD Break the Law on ICE Raids) and skip down to something more interesting:

  I told you Tulsi Gabbard was going to hate the job of Director of National Intelligence.

  Do you remember ever seeing any other director of national intelligence releasing a video weighing in on U.S. foreign policy on his or her still-active personal social media account? I suspect that you barely remember hearing at all from Avril Haines, John Ratcliffe, Dan Coats, Dennis Blair, etc. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, because the director of national intelligence isn’t a public-facing job, and the person in it isn’t supposed to be a celebrity.

  And yet, Tuesday afternoon, Gabbard felt the need to announce to the American people, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”

  Really? I was halfway through my research when I found Noah Rothman had beaten me to it:

  Are we really closer to the “brink of nuclear annihilation” today than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are we closer than we were on November 9, 1979, when a malfunction indicated to NORAD that a massive nuclear attack on the U.S. was underway? Is it worse than June 3, 1980, when a similar false alarm proved so convincing that Zbigniew Brzezinski resolved to not wake his wife so she would be vaporized painlessly in her sleep? Is the geopolitical situation more unstable than it was in September 1983, when the Soviets experienced their own false alarm — a persistent one that continued despite rebooting the system — in which one Soviet missile officer’s discretion alone averted unimaginable disaster?

  Never mind her likely unfamiliarity with the history of the subject, if you’re going to ominously declare that we’re “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” with an Angelo Badalamenti–esque ominous soundtrack playing in the background, shouldn’t you . . . explain how we’re so close to a nuclear exchange? Was she referring to Russia? India and Pakistan? North Korea?

  Regretably, Tulsi's a show horse, not a workhorse.

• Who wants to go to Oklahoma City, anyway? The AntiPlanner brings the latest success story: Texas Cancels Amtrak Funding.

  The Texas legislature has declined to continue funding a train between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Amtrak calls the train a “vital transportation option,” but in fact few people ride it and it is a costly burden to Oklahoma and Texas taxpayers.

  The train, Amtrak says, served “over 80,000 customers in FY24 and reach[ed] $2.2 million in ticket revenue,” which is supposed to somehow sound impressive. Amtrak’s press release fails to mention that the train cost $9.6 million to operate, not counting depreciation, which means it cost taxpayers at least $92 per rider, and probably much more. In short, taxpayers have to pay more than three quarters of the cost, much more than the average Amtrak train, for which taxpayers cover “only” about 59 percent of the cost (which is still too much).

  I took the Amtrak Downeaster down to Boston and back last month, to see Jimmy Webb in concert. It was kinda arduous and time-consuming, but I suppose I needed to be reminded of that.

• Nine? Oh, right. George Will lists Nine reasons for cautious optimism about individual liberty. (WaPo gifted link)

  I did not expect his leadoff word…

  Aristotle’s axiom “one swallow does not make a summer” suggests caution in anticipating large reverberations from a Supreme Court ruling last week. But the court’s unanimous affirmation of a principle that is commonsensical but now controversial might indicate its readiness to temper the racialization of American law and governance, to which the court has contributed.

  In 2019, Marlean Ames, a heterosexual Ohio woman who had worked in a state agency since 2004, was denied a promotion for a job that went to a lesbian colleague with less experience at the agency and lesser academic credentials. Ames was subsequently demoted to a position involving a 40 percent pay cut, and her prior position was filled by a gay man.

  Ames filed a lawsuit saying she was discriminated against, in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because of her sexual orientation. She lost in a district court, and in her appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which held that she had not demonstrated “background circumstances” (not defined, anywhere) to justify her suspicion of discrimination. This demonstration requires, the 6th Circuit said, a member of a majority to show that her employer is “that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

  GFW is eloquent, as always, and notes that we'll see pretty soon how willing SCOTUS is to apply this "commonsensical" principle in upcoming decisions.

• So long, Abe. David R. Henderson asks if you have Thoughts For Your Penny? (I must admit mine are curmudgeonly.)

  One of the concepts you come across in a well-taught monetary economics course is the idea of seigniorage. An online dictionary does a pretty decent job of defining it: “The profit made by a government by issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production cost.” Although the definition highlights coins, the concept applies to paper money also.

  The US government makes a pretty penny (pun intended) on seigniorage. It’s not as much as it used to be because more and more people use credit cards and even cryptocurrency to buy goods and services. Still, it’s a good amount.

  The biggest gain from seigniorage is on the $100 bill. Printing one costs the federal government just 9.4 cents. So, when the feds spend this $100, they make a nice profit of $99.90. Not bad. Printing a $1 bill costs the feds 3.2 cents. So even on a $1 bill, the feds make 97 cents.

  But minting small coins loses money for the feds. In its 2024 Annual Report, the US Mint reports the cost of producing each coin denomination. The cost of producing a penny was $0.03. In other words, the cost of producing a penny was three times the value of the penny. Interestingly, the feds went underwater even on the nickel, whose cost, at $0.11, was over twice the value of the nickel. That’s why I stated earlier that the federal government should stop producing nickels also. It isn’t until you get to the dime that you find a coin that the feds make money on. Interestingly, the cost of producing a dime, at $0.045, is less than the cost of producing a nickel.

  I have no interest in nickel-and-diming the Mint, but there's no reason to sob over the fact that the seigniorage on two particular types of currency is negative. That simply doesn't matter a hill of beans in this crazy world.

  And it's a useful reminder of how debased our currency is.