Dec
29
2025

"Zero Sum" is Way Optimistic, J.D.

Vice-President Vance tweets:

J.D., I am impressed that you can use the term "zero sum game" in a grammatically correct way. I suppose that's to be expected from a Yale Law graduate.

But pretty clearly the Minnesota story is overall strongly negative sum. Google's AI patiently spells it out for me, and now you: Is fraud a negative sum game? (links elided):

Yes, fraud is considered a negative-sum game.

Here's why:

  • Zero-sum vs. Negative-sum: In a zero-sum game (like poker), one person's gain is exactly another's loss, and the net change in wealth is zero. In a negative-sum game, the total value decreases, meaning the sum of all gains and losses is less than zero.
  • Wealth Destruction: Fraud is an act of taking something from one party, but the process of committing and dealing with the fraud consumes resources (time, money, equipment, legal fees, administrative costs) that do not benefit any of the participants, including the fraudster.
  • Overall Loss: While the perpetrator of the fraud gains something, the victims' losses, combined with all the associated societal and individual costs (investigation, litigation, emotional distress, loss of confidence in the system, etc.), outweigh the fraudster's gain. The net result for society as a whole is a loss of wealth or value.

Always happy to help out, J.D.

Also of note:

  • Heartbreaking. Ben Sasse recently tweeted:

    Click through and read the whole thing to get a textbook example of class and bravery.

    For another encomium, see Jim Geraghty: Ben Sasse is exiting the stage far too soon. (WaPo gifted link) A snippet from his service as one of Nebraska's senators:

    As a senator, Sasse clearly relished his work — particularly on the Senate Intelligence Committee — but also remained a devoted father to his three children, multitasking whenever possible, including helping his son with homework behind the committee dais. His arrival in the Senate immediately preceded Donald Trump’s emergence in the GOP, and Sasse never altered his bluntly negative assessment of Trump, refusing to endorse him in 2016 and 2020.

    During this service in the Senate, Sasse voted with the Trump administration when he agreed with it, on tax cuts, and all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. He staunchly supported the filibuster, understanding that no GOP Senate majority was eternal.

    Sasse said in a video message to the central committee afterward, “I listen to Nebraskans every day, and very few of them are as angry about life as some of the people on this committee. Not all of you, but a lot. Political addicts don’t represent most Nebraska conservatives. … Politics isn’t about the weird worship of one dude.”

    My first mention of Sasse here at Pun Salad was an appreciation of his apolitical 2017 column in the WSJ: How to Raise an American Adult. (WSJ gifted link). If you're in need of such advice, or even if you're not, check it out.

  • Worse even than buying a "fixer upper" house. In the WSJ, Ge Bai and Elizabeth Plummer point out a small problem: ObamaCare Is a Money Pit for Taxpayers. (WSJ gifted link)

    Congress may yet extend ObamaCare “enhanced” premium subsidies. A new study shows why that would be a reckless act toward taxpayers.

    Using health insurers’ mandatory filings, our study, published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, shows that the ObamaCare individual market has become a money pit for taxpayers. In 2024 they paid nearly 80% of the premiums for subsidized plans—compared with only 30% in 2014.

    Taxpayers paid more than $114 billion directly to insurers in 2024—one-third more after inflation than in 2023, more than double the amount in 2020 (before the enhanced subsidies), and more than six times as much as in 2014. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this acceleration continued in 2025.

    Why? Through regulations, ObamaCare banned affordable insurance options and destroyed independent physician practices, damaging the insurance and provider markets. Consolidation, administrative bloat, high prices and soaring premiums followed. Our study shows the correlation between premium growth and subsidy growth is nearly perfect.

    Here's hoping D.C. Republicans find enough backbones to resist throwing more money into that pit.

  • Tease MAGAs at your peril. Also at the WSJ, their relatively sane editorial board debunk MAGA’s Latest Stolen 2020 Election Theory.

    The 2026 midterms are coming, and Republicans have work to do if they want to hold Congress. Yet the nation’s MAGA minds are still looking back at 2020 and stretching to justify President Trump’s delusion of a stolen election. The latest involves the embarrassing news that Fulton County, Ga., failed to have its poll workers sign many of the tabulator tapes for early voting.

    “I have not seen the tapes myself, but we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed,” an attorney for Fulton County told the Georgia State Election Board during a December hearing. “It was a violation of the rule. Since 2020, again, we have new leadership, and a new building, and a new board, and new standard operating procedures, and since then the training has been enhanced.”

    The admission rocketed around the MAGA-sphere as a claim that Georgia’s results in 2020 included 315,000 illegally counted votes. Mr. Trump lost the state by 11,779 overall, and Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, is a Democratic stronghold, where Joe Biden carried 73%. The refrain on the right is that the unsigned tapes somehow prove Mr. Trump has been correct about the election all along.

    Nope. Not even close:

    Yet Georgia’s ballots in 2020 were counted three times, twice by scanner and once by hand, five million of them. “In 73% of Georgia’s 159 counties, the margin of the hand count varied from the original by 10 voters or fewer,” these pages reported at the time. “In a quarter of counties, the two numbers exactly matched.” In other words, the hand tally validated the machine count.

    Earlier last week, local Granite Grokster Amil Imani did that MAGA thing: DOJ hammers Fulton County Over 315,000 ghost votes.

    Wincing a bit, I commented with a link to this Dispatch article from Stephen Richer No, Fulton County Early 2020 Votes Aren’t Likely To Be Decertified (archive.today link). I called it a "calmer explanation". I suppose I should have expected the level of vituperation I got. I might have been more upset if I were nine years old. But, geez, if you want to see a bunch of people demonstrating confirmation bias, check it out.

Recently on the book blog: