Pun Salad

Barton Swaim explains Why Climate-Change Ideology Is Dying.

I'm trying to think of a name for the ideology that earnestly believes "You can fix any social problem by lavish spending by the Federal Government. If that doesn't seem to work, then we weren't spending enough."

Also of note:

• Also searching for an ideological label is… Jeff Maurer, who tosses the question to his readers: What Word Should I Use for a President Who Claims Vast Powers that He Clearly Doesn't Have?

  In the past week, the president has:

  • Tried to unilaterally nullify part of the Fourteenth Amendment;

  • Tried to nullify Congress’ ability to spend money;

  • Ordered the Justice Department to ignore the TikTok ban, which should be in effect right now but isn’t;

  • Dropped all pretense that the tariffs he keeps threatening to unilaterally impose have anything to do with “national security”.

  This seems bad to me. This seems like a president trying to do stuff that he’s clearly not allowed to do and seeing how it goes — if the president was a toddler, we’d call this “boundary testing”. And Republicans are playing the role of wilfully ignorant parent, utterly convinced that their precious little boy — their sweet Donnie Angel, that special little child — could never do anything bad.

  Equally predictably, the left is freaking out. It’s unfortunate that some on the left always reach for the most extreme language available — calling Trump a “fascist” doesn’t mean much once you’ve already used that word to describe Bush, Obama, J.K. Rowling, traffic cameras, and Thomas the Tank Engine. In my opinion, “fascist” has lost all meaning, and it should be put in a locked drawer until we show that we can use it responsibly. And, as I've written before, hyperbole doesn’t really do anything except let your opponents: 1) Portray you as crazy, and 2) Be kind of right about that.

  It's not just Donnie Angel, of course. Obama famously declined to enforce Federal marijuana laws. Biden tried to decree student loan "forgiveness" with no accompanying legislative action. Examples are plentiful, and go back a long way.

  But as Gene Healy wrote an entire book about, this has been going on for a long time. And …

  Unless Americans change what we ask of the office―no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have―we’ll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

• Speaking of what we wan't and cannot have… David R. Henderson and Phillip Magness advise: Don’t Substitute Tariffs for Income Taxes: You’ll Get Both. There's some math, but if I can understand it, I assume you can too:

  In his inaugural address, President Trump repeated his call for an External Revenue Service. At other times, he has talked about replacing personal income taxes with high tariffs on imports. Besides the fact that U.S. tariffs on imports are collected from U.S. importers, not external exporters, this idea would not work and would likely result in a higher tax burden for Americans.

  Current income tax revenues are about $2.5 trillion per year. Goods imports are just over $3 trillion per year. So replacing individual income taxes would imply an 83 percent tariff rate. But that’s true only if raising tariff rates by over 2,500 percent (from under 3 percent to 83 percent) would have no effect on the level of imports. Because people would buy fewer imports if they had to pay that tax, the tariff rate would have to be substantially higher or the income tax system would have to be retained.

  Trump businesses declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009; he could be shooting for his biggest one yet.

• But maybe before the government goes bankrupt… Trump could write a happy ending to this tale, as told by Sam Kazman: Dishwashers Gone Bad: A Regulatory Soap Opera.

  “Hang on to your old appliances.” These were the parting words of my dishwasher repairman after his last service call. They weren’t reassuring.

  Why did he give this advice? Because the newer models won’t last very long or work very well.

  The sorry state of new home appliances is not just one guy’s personal observation. Complaints about the poor durability of new appliances abound on the web, and they’re backed up by authoritative sources. The “Family Handyman,” for example, finds that “lifespans for most major appliances have decreased significantly over the past 25 years.” And when it comes to performance, the diminished capabilities of new dishwashers and laundry machines have become legendary—and not in a good way. Decades ago, dishwashers took about an hour to clean and dry a load of dishes; today, they take about two and a half hours, and the dishes often turn out neither clean nor dry.

  I'm still hanging onto our 38-year-old dishwasher, which is noisy but works well. It would be blasphemous to pray for it to live forever, but…

• In layman's language… David Harsanyi is nobody's puppet, and he tells the simple truth in the NYPost: RFK Jr. is a menace.

  The US Senate has the constitutional duty to vet the president’s nominees and ensure that no unfit authoritarians find their way into the White House.

  Which brings me to the appointment of brainworm-ridden dilettante Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

  There has perhaps never been a Republican Cabinet nominee in history less suited for public office.

  RFK’s experience (zero), his temperament (unhinged) and his ideas (extremist) impel the Senate to keep him out of the new presidential administration.

  I know Trump thinks he owes Junior something for his electoral support. But I wonder if he isn't secretly hoping the Senate will reject him, and allow him to appoint someone else. Not as menacing.

• He doesn't have the cash? Kevin D. Williamson says Vladimir Putin Isn’t Buying Donald Trump’s Shtick.

  One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t … know stuff.

  My own theory of the case, following Sherlock Holmes’ advice—“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: an ignorant buffoon who has been carried to the presidency twice on the winds of resentment, romanticism, and nihilism. Trump is a weird combination of Chauncey Gardiner and the Bizarro World version of Pope Celestine V, the naïve hermit who was dragged out of his hole in the ground and plunked down in the Chair of St. Peter when exasperated cardinals decided that what the sclerotic papacy needed was a political outsider … who could be easily manipulated by insiders. (Fun fact: Celestine was nominated to the papacy by Cardinal Latino Malabranca Orsini, nephew of Pope Nicholas III and one of the reasons we talk about nepotism, or nephew-ism.) Even with years in the wilderness to prepare—not that anybody thought he was going to make profitable use of the time!—Trump walks around malevolently ignorant of the most elementary facts of political and economic life.

  For example, when President Trump recently tried to bully Vladimir Putin (via social media, of course) into accepting a Ukraine “peace deal” (which is not a peace deal at all but another one of those “We have a … concept of a plan” Trump things), Putin did not budge. (The czar is not for budging.) And so Trump broke out his big gun, practically the only weapon in his arsenal: He threatened to impose heavy tariffs on Russian exports to the United States.

  Putin seemed nonplussed. So did a lot of other people.

  Inconveniently for the tariff-loving Trump, Russia exports almost nothing to the United States, which as of 2022 accounted for about 3 percent of Russian trade. Historically, most of the Russian exports to the United States have been exactly what you’d expect them to be: petroleum products. (Russian coal imports to the United States were prohibited in 2022.) Which is to say, Trump’s big idea for putting Putin in his place is a measure that would have had very little effect on Russia (which is already dealing with Western economic sanctions) but might have led to marginally higher energy prices in the United States, where the price of gasoline is even more of an explosive political issue than the price of eggs.

  If you're confused by KDW's used of "nonplussed"… well, so was I, and so I looked it up and found this.

  Nobody, it turns out, is ever "plussed". It only happens when you stick a '+' in front of a number. Then that number is plussed.

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