Pun Salad

I just think Mr. Ramirez's latest cartoon is pretty cool looking.

And just in case you were wondering. I can't vouch for the material I quote from other sources, but as it says over there on your right: Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the blogger.

Not some bot.

At least not yet.

Also of note:

• 

  It's a matter of degree. Kevin D. Williamson reflects on the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the NYC mayoral primary, and wonders: Does ‘Socialism’ Still Mean Anything?

  People are interested in socialism. The light little book I wrote on socialism more than a decade ago has been by far the best-selling of any of my books, and I am amused from time to time to see advertisements for the Portuguese version of it that was apparently well-received in Brazil. (Parents often buy the book as a graduation present for college-bound students, and many of them ask me to write some version of “Don’t believe everything those commies at Brown tell you next year!” in signed copies.) I shouldn’t be surprised by that, given that people are also very interested in such exotic nonsense as astrology and veganism, but socialism does seem like one of those things we should all have gotten over before now. 

  There are very few socialist countries left in the world, and those that remain tend to be basket cases such as North Korea and Cuba. India is constitutionally socialist, but that is strictly parchment socialism. It probably would not be accurate to describe the so-called People’s Republic of China as socialist, but it would be fair to say that it is a country in which the single-party police state that runs the place is led by men who take socialism seriously, who think of themselves as socialists and their project as a socialist project. 

  I bought and read KDW's "light little book" back in 2011; my report is here, and you can use the link on your right to get it at Amazon.

  From that report, by the way:

  [… KDW] uses the word "syncretic" on page 52. And I've resolved to look that up some day.

  And if I did that, I've forgotten what it means.

• Unseen, unsaid, and probably undone. At my newly-discovered Substack, The Unseen and The Unsaid, contributor Joshua Rowley provides Seven Options to Replace Byrded-Out Savings in OBBBA. That's the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act", now getting attention from the Senate. Specifically, the Senate Parliamentarian's attention, who's pointing out the provisions that are subject to filibusterization, and hence won't make it ("Byrded-out") into the final version.

  This one might make me wince a bit:

  2. Remove the new deduction for seniors. The House version of OBBBA includes a new $4,000 deduction for seniors as a nod to President Trump’s campaign pledge to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits. This new deduction is in addition to an existing deduction for the blind and elderly that equaled $1,550 last year. The Senate version raises the new deduction to $6,000, with a $91 billion price tag — a substantial cost for a policy that amounts to simple pandering to an age demographic already at the top of the wealth distribution.

  Sure, go ahead and push granny off the cliff.

  When I think about all the dollar flows between me, my employers, and Uncle Stupid over the years, I've developed a deep appreciation of how arbitrary it all is. I'm sure whatever comes out of the latest process will be just another layer on that cake.

• Just making it up as they go. Jessica Riedl looks at that topic from a different angle: The Collapse of GOP Policymaking.

  Republicans vociferously claim their tax legislation—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by the House and working its way through the Senate—would unleash an economic boom so colossal that its resulting tax revenues would offset the entire cost. This dubious boast was shredded by a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reality check showing that the bill’s broader economic effects actually increase the 10-year cost projection by $356 billion.

  According to this “dynamic score,” the bill is so poorly designed that it would fail to produce any significant long-term increase in economic growth. Instead, the tiny amount of growth revenues would be swallowed by $441 billion in added 10-year federal debt interest costs that would result from the bill raising interest rates across the economy and on the entire federal debt. Those “dynamic” interest costs from rising rates are in addition to $551 billion in interest costs that would be paid specifically on the bill’s $2.4 trillion in 10-year borrowing.

  Rather than address the bill’s extraordinary cost, Republicans responded by attacking the CBO. They challenged the agency’s historical accuracy by claiming that it failed to competently score the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)–even as CBO’s subsequent revenue estimate achieved 99.5 percent accuracy up until the pandemic. President Donald Trump accused the CBO of being run by Democrats even though its director is a Republican. Sen. Tim Scott produced a video claiming that CBO also erroneously scored tax cuts in the 1930s and 1960s—which is impossible because CBO did not exist until 1974, not to mention that those 1930s tax cuts actually took place in the 1920s. All because the CBO refused to pretend that the House Republican tax bill would pay for itself or even offset a portion of the cost.

  Like Joshua above, Jessica uses the p-word in characterizing the GOP's efforts: "lazy special-interest pandering combined with an almost mystical belief in an economic nirvana that never arrives."

  That is, they sound more like Democrats every day.

• Almost? So you're saying there's a chance? George Will thinks Exploding U.S. indebtedness makes a fiscal crisis almost inevitable. (WaPo gifted link)

  Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was more tantalizing than illuminating when he recently said, regarding the nation’s fiscal trajectory, “You are going to see a crack in the bond market.” Details, even if hypotheticals, would be helpful concerning the market where U.S. debt is sold.

  Twenty-five percent of Treasury bonds, about $9 trillion worth, are held by foreigners, who surely have noticed a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill (1,018 pages). Unless and until it is eliminated, the provision empowers presidents to impose a 20 percent tax on interest payments to foreigners. The potential applicability of this to particular countries and kinds of income is unclear. It could be merely America First flag-waving.

  But foreign bond purchasers, watching the U.S. government scrounge for money as it cuts taxes and swells the national debt in trillion-dollar tranches, surely think: What the provision makes possible is possible. Such a significant devaluation of foreign-purchased Treasury bonds would powerfully prod foreign investors to diversify away from Treasurys, which would raise the cost of U.S. borrowing an unpredictable amount.

  And so on that cheerful note… see you tomorrow, I hope.