Jun
18
2025

Different Wording, Same Attitude

I could not resist replying:

Goodness knows I'm not a Trump fan, but flinging childish insults about his supporters is no way to woo people to your side.

Also of note:

  • Fetish (n): an object believed to have magical powers. Recently outing himself as a fetishist is New Hampshire State Representative David Meuse, in the editorial pages of my worthless local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat. His headline reveals what he thinks is really to blame for a recent atrocity: Assassinations in Minnesota part of nation's larger plague of gun violence.

    Meuse will not be the first politician, nor the last, to point with horror at the murder weapon, and not the monster wielding it.

    But where is the standard followup, the part where one or more gun control measures are advocated? Meuse is a state legislator, after all. You don't even need to come up with something that would have prevented the horror in Minnesota! Goodness knows, that's never stopped other wannabe gun-controllers!

    Well it gets pretty lame, and I've bolded his proposed "solution":

    Until we do more to protect ALL of us from gun violence, we will continue to live with the consequences of brutal and unnecessary tragedies like the one in Minnesota.

    That's it. "Do more."

    It's just that simple!

  • Welcome to Serfdom! Population: Us. Jim Geraghty reports: We Saw ‘Government Motors,’ Now Trump Has Created ‘U.S. Government Steel’. Quoting Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick's tweet:

    That "perpetual Golden Share" essentially makes U.S. Steel a nationalized industry. Click through for the superpowers it awards to "the President of the United States or his designee".

    Jim comments:

    I hope all the Republicans who justifiably objected, loudly and frequently, to the U.S. government purchasing shares of General Motors – earning the company the derisive nickname, “Government Motors” – remember to object to this arrangement. The board of directors of U.S. Steel and those who own the 226 million shares of U.S. Steel stock no longer really make the decisions for the company; now the U.S. government gets to veto the decisions listed above.

    Jim also fondly remembers that "Before, during, and after the taxpayer bailout, GM continued to make millions of vehicles that could kill you if your key chain was too heavy."

    My take on the GM bailout, back in the day, may be viewed here.

  • “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” (Ronald Reagan.)

    At Cato, Nicholas Anthony looks at a program that hasn't been used by anyone since 2022: Postal Banking Continues to Fail.

    For anyone wondering, “What is the postal banking pilot program?” here’s a brief breakdown to get you up to speed. The United States Postal Service (USPS) offered banking services up until 1966. It was largely discontinued because the service wasn’t popular. More recently, however, people have been calling for a return to postal banking. The argument is that having the government provide bank accounts would help the millions of Americans who do not have accounts.

    The USPS needs Congress to sign off on such a radical change, and there’s little sign of that happening. So, the USPS did the next worst thing: it exploited past expansions of its authority to create the postal banking pilot program. Almost overnight, the USPS launched the new program in four cities. People could now bring in their payroll checks and get them loaded onto prepaid gift cards, albeit for a fee of $5.95 and a daily limit of $500.

    Of course, the employees that keep track of postal banking's lack of use go on drawing a salary.

    Pun Salad's previous article on postal banking may be found here. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Warren was a fan back then.

  • Going out on a limb. The AntiPlanner predicts Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028.

    “With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

    Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years.

    Amtrak or its backers have promised that profitability was just around the corner ever since it began. […]

    Amtrak is asking Congress for a cool $2,427,000,000 in FY2026. What I'd like to see in response is: "How about nothing? Does nothing work for you?"

  • Speaking of spending money we don't have… Allison Schrager writes on Fair-weather Hawks.

    I’ve seen some very strong opinions about the Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone suddenly seems to have found debt religion. Welcome to the club! Though I’m wary of these new debt hawk allies—because their objections strike me as more politically convenient than a sudden and sincere concern about the debt. No one is speaking out against anything their political constituency actually favors. I don’t hear Republican debt hawks naming a single tax cut they don’t like. (For the record, I favor extending the TCJA and restoring bonus depreciation—though I’d prefer thoughtful tax reform.) I hate increasing the SALT limit, the tax on tips, and all the other new distortions we’re throwing in that will never go away.

    Meanwhile, Democrats are incensed that ANYONE might lose Medicaid coverage—even able-bodied young men—especially if anyone else is getting a tax cut. We’ve expanded Medicaid a lot over the years. Are they arguing every expansion must be irreversible? Just say you see Medicaid as a backdoor way to create a government option that covers most people—even those who are borderline middle class.

    I wrote for Bloomberg that both Democrats and Republicans need to get real. Republicans must accept that taxes need to go up; Democrats must accept that we can’t afford a welfare state for the middle class. If they did, we could actually make progress. We could broaden the tax base (get rid of all the deductions), lower rates, and implement a VAT. We could also agree that welfare is for the needy and unlucky, make it work better for the people who need it, and remove all the incentives that make work expensive if you live on benefits. That would not only save us lots of money and fix the debt problem—it would also boost growth.

    My memory may be fading, but I still remember that it's a bad idea for Republicans to buy a tax increase now for a pinky-swear promise of spending reductions in the future. Cue up the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".


Last Modified 2025-06-18 7:52 AM EDT