Pun Salad

Veronique de Rugy advises you to not get your hopes up: Tax Cuts Yes, But Don't Expect 'Big, Beautiful' Growth. Skipping down to the caveats:

And more. I hate to be the turd in the punchbowl, but I fear Vero and the other critics of the One Big Beautiful Bill are right.

On the wasteful, dumb, absurd, and unconstitutional front:

• Who doesn't love a parade? Billy Binion at Reason for one: Trump's military parade is a waste of millions of taxpayer dollars.

  President Donald Trump has described the upcoming military parade using a familiar theme: its size. It will be a "big, beautiful" event, he told NBC's Meet the Press last month.

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The parade will, however, objectively be big, from the contents of the parade itself—25 M1 Abrams main battle tanks! Dozens of other military vehicles! Aircrafts! 6,600 soldiers marching!—to the price tag, which is currently estimated to come out somewhere between $25 million and $45 million for an approximately 90-minute event. That comes out to $277,778–$500,000 per minute.

  A majority of Americans, it turns out, do not think that big cost is beautiful; 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll said the parade is not a good use of taxpayer money. The sample size was 40 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat, with the remaining 20 percent identifying as "independent/none."

  The millions of dollars the public is paying to fund the parade—which will take place on Saturday, Trump's 79th birthday—are "peanuts," the president said, when "compared to the value." Yet it is difficult to reconcile that position with one of his hallmark campaign promises: reining in wasteful government spending.

  Well, maybe there will be some cool video involved.

• Who doesn't love dumb government grocery stores? As long as the ill effects don't extend up here, I'm in agreement with Jeff Maurer: I Want Zohran Mamdani to Become Mayor of New York So That I Can Watch His Dumb Government Grocery Stores Fail.

  New York is reaching the end of the term of Eric Adams, a Democrat embraced by Trump because he shares Trump’s deep commitment to corruption. The options in the Democratic primary have basically dwindled to a socialist nitwit and a mediocre pervert, where “mediocre” refers to the candidate’s ability as a legislator, not his résumé as a pervert. It’s also not impossible for Adams to win reelection, hence the video above. Other off-the-wall scenarios are also in play, because this election is like hearing something rustle in the bushes in Prospect Park: Any manner of surprising awfulness might emerge.

  If I still lived in New York, I would probably vote for the mediocre pervert. But I don’t live in New York; I left a few years ago for Washington, DC, where civic politics is a sophisticated tête-à-tête between philosopher kings and queens, producing the enlightened utopia that you see before you today. So, my rooting interest here is purely as a shit-stirring outsider — I’m just in it for the LOLs, folks. And that’s why I want Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani to win so that I can watch his dumb plan for city-owned grocery stores go up in flames like a Waymo in Los Angeles.

  I didn't include the video, but it's somewhat amusing, if you're not a sheep. Mamdani's plan is (incredibly) even worse than you might expect from the general rule that "socialism doesn't work".

• Who doesn't love "campaign finance reform"? George Will doesn't, and he views Peak absurdity on campaign finance reform heads to the Supreme Court. (WaPo gifted link)

  Developments in recent decades reflect diminished respect for the First Amendment. These include campus speech codes, political pressure for censorship on social media platforms, and a society-wide “cancel culture” that inspires self-censorship lest “harmful” speech “trigger” offended hearers.

  The most serious speech-regulation began half a century ago, under the antiseptic rubric of “campaign finance reform.” On Wednesday, the Supreme Court can begin removing another shackle reformers have clamped on political speech. The court will consider taking a case about whether the First Amendment is violated by limits on what political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates’ campaigns.

  The biggest problem I have with political speech is how to avoid it. I'm pretty sure it causes brain rot.

• And who doesn't love government funding of public broadcasting? Jeffrey Miron asks Should Government Fund Public Broadcasting? And guess what Betteridge's Law of Headlines says about that?

  On May 27, NPR, Aspen Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, and KSUT Public Radio filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that would cancel all federal support for public media.

  The lawsuit argues that the order violates the First Amendment and the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which prevents federal agencies from controlling the CPB. The CPB distributes federal funds to local public radio and television stations.

  We set aside whether a president or only Congress can cancel federal funding for CPB and instead address whether such funding is good policy. Our answer is no.

  The main reason is that such funding is inconsistent with the First Amendment. Any government policy or program has a viewpoint, but funding television and radio broadcasting is especially problematic, since government financing inevitably subsidizes some perspectives over others. Even a formally ‘neutral’ grant process cannot escape this effect: public money sustains the editorial judgments of the recipients and leaves rival voices to fend for themselves.

  This should not be hard.

Recently on the book blog:

Pity the author, Marc J. Dunkelman! This book, dealing as it does with the perceived difficulty of implementing grand government-driven schemes lumped under the broad category of "progress", seems to cover very similar ground as does another book: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And Abundance seems to be getting a lot more attention.

For example, I could easily find Dunkelman's book at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library; in contrast, PPL owns three copies of Abundance, and they are all checked out (as I type).

Dunkleman's thesis is pretty simple. He adapts the terminology of the early 20th century Progressive, Herbert Croly, who was famous for his advocacy of using "Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends". (Croly was also one of the leading examples/villains of Jonah Goldberg's classic title Liberal Fascism, but we won't get into that.) Dunkleman is not as hostile toward Jefferson as Croly was, though. His approach is that your standard Progressive harbors both (a) a "Hamiltonian" yen to accomplish Big Projects under the direction of wise and benvolent central planners and bureaucrats; and (b) a "Jeffersonian" impulse that central authorities have too much unchecked power to run roughshod over individuals and communities that don't have as much political pull. Currently, he believes, the Jeffersonian ideal holds sway; it's why we can't have nice things, like high-speed rail, "affordable" housing, and hydro power from Quebec down here in New England.

Dunkleman is a Progressive, and is mostly aiming his argument at other Progressives. He views one Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian oscillation as "the yin turned to yang, the ebb turned to flow, and the teeter-totter crossed its fulcrum." The idea that there might be some fundamental, and essentially insoluble, problems with Progressive central planning is not seriously considered. Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is briefly mentioned along the way, but only as a sign of increasing skepticism of the Progressive project. I kept looking for other serious criticisms: mentions of public choice theory, for example, but if they were there, I missed them. To his credit, Dunkleman does seem to recognize the problem of regulatory capture, especially when he looks at passenger airline deregulation. (Which happened largely thanks to … Progressive Ted Kennedy!)

As noted, one of Dunkleman's examples is a local one: he goes into great detail on the Northern Pass project, meant to string high-voltage power lines down through northern New Hampshire, down to Concord, Deerfield, and (eventually) Massachusetts.

The book is full of tales like that; I confess I found many of them not as interesting. Dunkleman keeps hammering them into his Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian thesis, though, to a somewhat tiresome extent. That gets repetitious.

The book's subtitle promises that Dunkleman will reveal "how to bring [progress] back". This, he finally gets around to telling the reader, is kind of misleading. On page 330 of the 333-page text: "This book was written not to prescribe thee specific changes that should be made in every realm of public policy, but to argue for a shift in narrative." Sigh. Fine.

I'll keep looking for Abundance.