Mar
11
2025

I'm Not Proud of Laughing at This, But…

It should be 'bad at econ', though, not math.

If you prefer, or need, an actual argument about this awful idea, Christopher Freiman has you covered:

A proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10% is gaining support from politicians on both the left and the right. Advocates argue that this policy will work to the advantage of potential borrowers who will no longer be charged rates of 25% or higher.

But things aren’t so simple. For one, there’s a straightforward economic argument against a cap on credit card interest rates: companies simply won’t extend credit to higher-risk borrowers if they aren’t able to secure a higher potential payout to offset the risk of default. (By analogy, you’re unlikely to invest in a high-risk tech startup instead of blue chip stocks unless the potential payout is high enough to offset the increased risk.) And this outcome would be bad for those borrowers since they would no longer be offered credit at all. Surely, an offer of a high interest credit card is better than no offer at all—more on this below.

CongressCritters AOC and Anna really need to start their own credit card companies, offering maximum 10% interest rates. I'm sure they can get some of their fellow economic illiterates to back them.

Also of note:

  • Does this mean we'll be underdue to end DST in the fall? Well, probably not, but J.D. Tuccille says that right now We're Overdue To End Daylight Saving Time. His bottom line is one you've seen here before, because I'm pretty tiresome about it:

    Obviously, there's wiggle room when it comes to estimating the total costs of forcing people to reset their clocks and their schedules twice each year. But it's hard to argue that clock changes benefit anybody except that subset of the population that really wants more daylight in the evening. For most of us, the impact of changing our clocks is measured in lost time, expense, and increased health risk.

    Daylight saving time was a paternalistic government experiment in socially engineering the country into less energy use by fiddling the clocks. Like most government gimmicks, it doesn't work as advertised. Let's get the government out of the business of telling us to how to set our clocks.

    Yes. Separation of time and state. An idea that is overdue underdue … good.

  • We dumped on Massachusetts Governor Healey yesterday, so… let's dump on a governor from a different neighboring state. James Erwin tracks the Decline of Maine Governors, from Joshua Chamberlain to Janet Mills.

    Maine Governor Janet Mills is enjoying a viral moment after her public spat with President Trump at the White House over her attempted nullification of federal law to allow boys in girls’ sports. The politics of my beloved home state remain consumed by Mills’s refusal to comply with new Title IX regulations, which has been aptly described as “neo-Confederate” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a disgrace to the office once held by Union hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

    James provides a brief bio of the admirable Governor Chamberlain. In contrast:

    And then there’s Janet Mills. Governor Mills would surely bristle at the notion that her defiance of President Trump’s executive order withholding federal funds from athletic programs that allow boys who claim they’re girls to compete in girls’ sports in any way resembles Southern and Confederate defiance of federal law. But while the underlying issues are of course different, the federal government again is in the right. Trump’s order is a perfectly legal application of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which has always mandated equal treatment of boys and girls in education, including by protecting and fully funding girls’ sports. Letting any boy who says he’s a girl compete is an obvious violation of what this federal law has always been understood to mean.

    It's like nobody on her staff warned her that sounding like a 1960s segregationist Southern governor was probably a bad idea.

    In case you missed the link above, here's a Portland Press-Herald story about (perhaps) the next governor of Maine: Laurel Libby turns muzzle into megaphone in transgender competition debate.

  • You'll see her standing in the schoolhouse gymnasium door next. Like Governor Mills, our own state's very-senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, isn't having any truck with those pointy-headed D.C. intellectuals telling states what to do: Local Groups Should 'Police' Trans Athletes, Not Federal Law. As reported by NHJournal:

    New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who voted against banning biological males from girls sports, now says it’s an issue that should be “policed” at the local level. It’s a significant reversal for a senator who until recently backed legislation mandating that males who identify as female should be treated as though they were born female.

    To repeat: It's like nobody on her staff warned her that sounding like a 1960s segregationist Southern governor was probably a bad idea.

  • "Gender Meltdown" would be a pretty good name for a glam-rock band. PowerLine's Steven Hayward looks at left-coast Scenes from the Gender Meltdown.

    Meanwhile, out in San Francisco, the Archimedes Banya spa (which sounds very woke) decided to hold an “Inclusive Women’s Night” in honor of International Women’s Week (which I missed somehow). The trouble is, a number of “penised people,” otherwise known as “transwomen,” turned up, because “tranwomen are women,” right? It seems some of the real women didn’t care for it, and have expressed their preference for a “phallus-free environment.” Next thing you know they’ll want segregated locker rooms.

    The spa's letter to its patrons is screen-shotted at the link, and like Treacher's tweet above, I'm not proud of finding it very funny.

    Googling the news stories for "Archimedes Banya spa" provides the headlines:

    • "SF bathhouse review-bombed after policy restricting trans access sparks outcry"
    • "Trans activists rip San Francisco spa for not letting them go nude during ‘women’s night’"
    • "Popular local spa faces backlash"
    • "S.F. agency probing nude bathhouse’s policy that excludes transgender people twice a month"
    • "SF bathhouse excludes trans women from new ladies-only night"
    • "Archimedes Banya Gets Social Media Uproar After Banning Trans Women From ‘Women’s Day’"
    • "San Francisco bathhouse accused of ‘transphobic’ policies"
    • "Transgender activists vow to attend 'religious women-only night' at San Francisco spa"
    • "Finding Calm and Community at SF’s Clothing-Optional Bohemian Bathhouse"
    • "Transgender activist group says San Francisco spa enacting exclusionary policies"

    Gee, it seems people aren't happy about a phallus-free environment. The "agency probing" mentioned in that sixth item is the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which sounds like it could be trouble for the spa. I mean, if you can't wave your willy at women, do you really have any Human Rights at all?

    The spa's website is here. "Where The Cultures Of The World Meet". Looks expensive!

    And, what do you know, "Gender Meltdown" actually is the name of a band. Looks inactive, though.


Last Modified 2025-03-12 5:25 PM EDT