Pun Salad

George Will notes how language degrades in uncivilized localities: Only in Washington could this fiscal vandalism be called tax ‘relief’. He's talking about the effort to raise, or eliminate, the limit on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction on your federal income tax, which is currently at $10K.

It takes a really outrageous proposal to get GFW to sound like Bernie Sanders inveighing against a giveaway to the well-off, but this makes the grade.

Also of note:

• This sounds like bad news. Brian Reidl thinks, credibly, that Trump Is Poised to Repeat Biden’s Economic Errors. Specifically, setting things up for another inflation spike. After noting the dire fiscal straits we are in:

  A responsible president facing these challenges would pursue an aggressive deficit reduction strategy to rein in borrowing and reassure the bond market (thus lowering interest rates). Instead, Trump has demanded trillions in new tax cuts, pandering to voters with promises to end taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits, in addition to extending and possibly expanding his 2017 tax cuts. Trump is also widely expected to push for significant defense and border spending expansions, while pledging to do nothing to rein in $124 trillion in projected 30-year shortfalls for Social Security and Medicare.

  There is no mathematical path to make these promises fiscally responsible, no easy trillion-dollar deficit-reducer that had been forgotten or hidden. Economic growth is no panacea. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s target of sustained 3 percent economic growth rates faces the aforementioned barrier of a stagnant (or even declining) workforce, not to mention the lack of a blueprint to achieve such faster growth. And even if 3 percent growth was achieved, most of the tax revenues may be consumed by the higher interest rates on the federal debt that often follow strong economic growth. Lawmakers should aspire to rosy economic scenarios while budgeting for a more typical economic performance.

  For approximately the 284th time: Nikki Haley would have been better.

• But what about the massive cuts to USAID? Tyler Cowen asked ChatGPT about it: good idea, or bad? Deep Research considers the costs and benefits of US AID. It produced a slightly pro-USAID response, but I expect it could have been biased by its sources. Still interesting though. Tyler is skeptical:

  Here is a useful Michael Kremer (with co-authors) paper. Here are some CRS links. Here is a Samo analysis. AID is a major contributor to the Gavi vaccine program, which is of high value. The gains from AID-supported PEPFAR are very high also.

  To be clear, I consider this kind of thing to be scandalous. And I strongly suspect that some of the other outrage anecdotes are true, though they are hard to confirm, or not. It does seem Nina Jankowicz and her work received funding, and that I find hard to justify. It seems to be evidence for something broken in the process. Or how about funds to the BBC? While the “Elonsphere” on Twitter is very much exaggerating the horror anecdotes and the bad news, I do see classic signs of “intermediaries capture” for the agency, a common problem amongst not-for-profit institutions.

  Yes, apparently a Nina Jankowicz organization in the UK got some USAID dough.

• Unfortunately, they are not laughing? At Reason, Jacob Sullum wonders: Why Is Paramount So Keen To Settle Trump's Laughable Lawsuit Against CBS?

  Paramount, which owns CBS, is reportedly trying to settle a laughable lawsuit that Donald Trump filed last October based on a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 2024 presidential election. The New York Times reports that the company started settlement negotiations because it is keen to avoid regulatory obstacles to its planned merger with Skydance Media.

  Paramount's principles get shoved into a dark corner of the executive suite when there's money at stake.

  But CBS coughed up the unedited transcript, and the Trump-friendly Eddie Scarry at the Federalist analyzed it, and concluded: Unedited Kamala Interview Proves '24 Campaign Was A Psyop. Unexpectedly!

  It’s been three months since the election, and there are still so many unanswered questions as to what exactly happened in the very obvious partnership that took place between the dying national news media and the Kamala Harris campaign. But a little more clarity was offered this week when Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, released the full nearly hour-long interview CBS “60 Minutes” aired with Harris several weeks before Election Day.

  The disclosure of the raw footage came as CBS cooperated with a complaint to the FCC from the Center for American Rights, a right-leaning law firm that accused the network of news distortion. The allegation followed a discrepancy observers noted between the short tease that CBS released in advance of the full “60 Minutes” episode and the final cut that aired and showed Harris offering a different answer to the same question.

  You can read the portions of the transcript that Eddie finds most Psyoptical at the link. For me, it's simply further confirmation that Kamala was a shallow nitwit, forever regurgitating bromines. ("You know, we are a people who have ambition and aspirations and dreams and optimism and hope.”)

  We have only those five things, because she could not think of six.

Recently on the book blog (with an LFOD reference!):

Over the years, I've read a lot of praise for this book. Certainly George Will has plugged it a lot in his WaPo column. And the University Near Here actually owns a couple copies, from back in the days when they bought physical books. Specifically, I checked out a refurbished paperback from them.

That praise continues on the back cover. "One of the funniest American novels in three decades"; "A delight of true understanding"; "Satirical virtuosity like nothing since Oscar Wilde"; "One of the wittiest books of modern times"; and more in that vein.

Maybe I'm going through a cranky patch, but I didn't find a lot of amusement. As usual: it's best to assume that's my fault, not the book's. You can read a long excerpt here; see if you crack a smile.

I noticed a few literary references. This probably means a lot more whizzed by without me noticing.

It's from 1954, which makes it nearly as old as I am. The author, Randall Jarrell, was an honored poet, teacher, and literary critic. Unfortunately, he fell into mental illness, attempted suicide, and died in 1965 when hit by a car. The NYT obituary is ambiguous about whether it was an accident or (successful) suicide.

Nothing much actually happens in the book: it's an exploration of the various characters the anonymous narrator meets while teaching at the fictional Benton College. They are a quirky and fractious bunch, full of self-importance, but also insecurity.

I sat up and took notice when a line of poetry is quoted from one character to another: "We must love one another or die." The response was to suggest instead: "We must love one another and die."

The poem is unidentified in the book, but it's easy to Google: it is Auden's "September 1, 1939". But apparently Auden himself later preferred the "and" replacement.

I doubt that New Hampshire is going to change its motto to "Live Free and Die". I briefly considered vandalizing my car's license plates to read that way, though. More subtle commentary than George Maynard's!

Confession: I did smile at this, the narrator's report from the college's "Art Night":

Miss Rasmussen began to tell Gottfried and me about her statues. Some of what she said was technical and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophic, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.

Zing! But, to be fair, the narrator adjusts his estimation of Miss Rasmussen at the very end of the book.