Pun Salad

Our Eye Candy Du Jour is page 24 from Jessica (nee Brian) Riedl's very informative November 2024 chart book covering all aspects of Federal spending, taxation, and associated myths and disasters. It appears in Dominic Pino's NR Corner post headlined Spending Till Kingdom Come While Raising Taxes Would Also End Badly. Which is a counterpoint to a post from Mark Antonio Wright's post headlined Spending Till Kingdom Come While Cutting Taxes Will End Badly,

With all due resepct to Mark, I'm on team Dominic. Both pieces are well worth your perusal, but here's Dominic's takeaway from the chart:

I'll take a "moderate" stance: Certainly Uncle Stupid has not shown himself to be a responsible steward of the 17-18% of GDP he's getting now. Maybe he should demonstrate that before demanding more.

Also of note:

• Cut 'em off at the past. Matthew Hennesey cheers: Planned Parenthood Gets Cut Off. (WSJ gifted link)

  Yes, one surviving benefit of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the defunding of the abortion mill.

  For all the beauty of the one big bill, the reaction to the abortion-funding provision is bound to get ugly. It’s the nature of the beast. The president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California called it “nothing short of cruelty for cruelty’s sake.” Planned Parenthood president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson is claiming in interviews that the new law will be “devastating” for patients who live in what she calls “maternity healthcare deserts.”

  None of that adds up. Planned Parenthood’s defenders insist that abortion is only a small part of what the organization does. They claim its core business is providing poor women in underserved areas with access to cancer screenings, mental-health counseling and birth control. If that’s the case, and so much vital healthcare provision is at stake, why get so worked up about the abortions? Why not let the controversial aspect of the business go and keep doing the Lord’s work?

  Because the vital healthcare claim is hogwash, and everyone knows it. Killing babies is what Planned Parenthood does, to the tune of 400,000 a year. Abortion—not pap tests or mental health—is the reason for its existence. Take that away and Planned Parenthood is nothing more than a glorified school nurse’s office.

  Matthew's column was written before a federal judge in Massachusetts demanded that Planned Parenthood funding be restored, in defiance of the legislation. We'll see how that works out.

  (Classic headline reference.)

• Or, put another way: "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Kevin D. Williamson describes What ‘Clear but False’ Ideas Get Wrong About Policy.

  “Winning the fight against hunger starts here,” reads the notice at a local restaurant, advertising a campaign against food waste. This is an example of something that Jonah Goldberg talks about from time to time, citing the political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: the “clear but false idea.” It makes superficial sense: If there were less waste, there would be more food available to eat, which would make it easier to feed hungry people. That’s the idea, anyway.

  The truth is that waste makes food less expensive rather than more expensive. The optimal amount of food waste in a restaurant or a grocery store is not zero, which may seem counterintuitive until you consider the fact that it costs money to reduce waste: You have reached the optimal amount of waste when the cost of preventing $1 in waste equals $1. The people who run Whole Foods and McDonald’s and Starbucks are logistically sophisticated, and they keep a hard eye on expenses—their goal is not to end waste for the sake of ending waste, but to reduce waste to the extent that doing so makes good business sense. The kind of enormously sophisticated, detailed planning and extremely precise execution necessary to radically reduce food waste in a restaurant chain would be very, very expensive. Eliminating waste would be—perverse though it may seem—wasteful.

  To reiterate a frequent theme of mine: Serious policy discussions are generally focused on things such as tradeoffs, incentives, and transaction costs; unserious policy discussions are almost always moralistic. The anti-waste stuff is moralistic in a classically American and puritanical way—as Benjamin Franklin wrote: “All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful.” As with a great many things that the witty Founding Father wrote and said about a great many subjects, that is persuasive, clear, and false. It is a moral sentiment masquerading as an economic observation. 

  Here's an idea: vote against any politician who claims their "solution" to some social ill will make you (or your children!) "safe".

• I think it's going to rain today. Jeff Maurer predicts: There’s a 110 Percent Chance That Our Discomfort With Statistics Is Costing Us. He quotes Nick Silver: "For years, when the Weather Channel said there was a 20 percent chance of rain, it actually rained only about 5 percent of the time."

  Basically: If there’s a five percent chance of rain, the Weather Channel will say there’s a 20 percent chance. And that’s because if they say “five percent,” people hear “There is no chance of rain whatsoever today. If you’re planning a picnic for the Suede Lovers of America, or hauling a bunch of sugar cubes in a pickup, today’s the day, because it won’t rain and if I’m wrong you can come to my house and kick me in the face.” The Weather Channel says “twenty percent” just so that you won’t yell at them if your sugar cube-hauling plans go awry.

  There’s no doubt about it: Many people don’t really understand probability. The conversation around every baseball team is a monsoon of probability ignorance despite the fact that baseball has been a stats-based game since back when the bat was a Civil War soldier’s amputated leg. Las Vegas is a city of modern-day palaces built on the misconceptions of people who look at the grandeur and think “Uh-hilk! I’ll bet they built this by giving out big paydays to people like me!” Every multiplayer board game should be called “Who Can Most Effectively Exploit The Simpleton?” Many people understand basic concepts like uncertainty and small sample size, but a shocking number don’t, and I think that catering to the people who don’t is making it hard to get accurate information.

  The trade-off here is pretty obvious. As Herbie Spencer said long ago: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

• No sir, that's not my baby. I get the impression that James Pethokoukis has grown tired of the demographic doomsayers. He takes to AEI to make The Baby Bust Reality Check.

  Every challenge isn’t a crisis. Nor does every challenge have a ready-to-go, five-point policy agenda — or any solution at all.

  So maybe it’s time to dial back the emerging panic about falling fertility. True, birth rates have collapsed across rich nations. South Korea manages around one child per woman, while Japan, Italy, Canada, and Greece hover around 1.5. This demographic reality is prompting politicians to throw money at the problem through costly natalist schemes. Yet empirical evidence suggests the demographic apocalypse narrative may be overblown.

  Modern adults increasingly view kids as competing with career ambitions and personal fulfillment rather than central to adult life. Anyone doomscrolling on TikTok knows that social media amplifies “intensive parenting” expectations, making child-rearing seem prohibitively daunting, both emotionally and financially. As such, most policies merely shift birth timing rather than increasing lifetime fertility. For example: A 30-year-old might claim a baby bonus but still end up with fewer children overall.

  Japan's population peaked back in 2010. They're dealing OK with it.

• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Isaac Asimov had one of his Foundation characters say that. I was never enough of a peacenik to buy that totally, but recently every day seems to bring fresh illustrations of his point. Jonathan Turley writes: “Have You Tried Gasoline?”: Democrats Admit Followers are Embracing Violent Rhetoric.

  “What we really need to do is be willing to get shot.” Those words to a Democratic member are part of a chilling Axios story on the rising violent rhetoric on the American left. As alleged Antifa members are arrested in Texas for the attempted murder of ICE agents, Democratic members are beginning to express private concerns over unleashing uncontrollable rage after their election defeat.

  Axios reported on conversations with Democratic members who admit that followers are turning to violence and rejecting messages of political reform.

  One House member explained that there is a “sense of fear and despair and anger” among voters that “puts us in a different position where … we can’t keep following norms of decorum.” The member does not address how Democratic leaders are fueling the rising violent rhetoric and imagery (including the most recent posted picture of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) brandishing a baseball bat).

  One House Democrat told Axios, “Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.”

  I suppose the "House Democrat" was too politic to just respond: "You first."