Pun Salad

Mr Ramirez pictures the issue well (note the elephant in the pilot seat, the donkey going along for the ride). And remember: Congress has, in its feeble hands, the constitutional "power of the purse.

Not pictured, unfortunately: the voters who put them in the plane. They deserve some blame too.

But this sort of thing gets my goat:

REMINDER: The single biggest driver of our national debt for the last 25 YEARS have been Republican-led tax cuts.

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) August 21, 2026

That's Senator Patty Murray from Washington State, but I assume you could find other Democrats making approximately the same charge. Let's take a look at the actual record (going back 96 years). Via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED:

In words, hopefully small enough words for Patty to understand: government receipts (blue line) have been remarkably stable post-WWII, between 15 and 20 percent of GDP, averaging about 17%. The last year shown was (according to FRED): 17.02%. What has drastically increased over the past 25 years: federal spending, the dashed green line. Last year shown: 22.8% of GDP.

Questions you and I should be asking Patty and every other candidate for federal office: what do you propose those numbers should be instead?

Also of note:

• Gosh, it's almost as if tariffs are making things less affordable. The WSJ editorialists note: Trump Has a Beef With Tariffs. (WSJ gifted link)

  One of the (many) problems with tariffs is that they lead to countless and arbitrary exceptions for political purposes. President Trump’s latest came Friday as he announced plans to lift tariffs on beef imports for 90 days. You may notice that this covers the three months through the November midterm elections.

  In a social-media post, Mr. Trump blamed Joe Biden for high beef prices and added: “As we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers, for the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff.” He pledged that the imports will be sold at 25% below “current market prices,” which was about $6.89 a pound in July, up substantially in the last two years.

  The editorial goes on to note: "Despite his claims that tariffs are a miracle economic cure, Mr. Trump has allowed exceptions for imported consumer electronics, smartphones, coffee, bananas, copper, chemicals, flat-panel TVs, memory chips, fertilizer, and hundreds of other products."

• Doing their bit to make things less affordable in New York City… At Reason, C. Jarrett Dieterle AND Adam Lehodey note: This Mamdani-backed bill would kill jobs, boost unions, and make deliveries more expensive.

  As if New York City weren't already an expensive enough place to live, legislation introduced to the City Council could soon make delivering packages in the five boroughs far costlier. Cloaked in the language of improving safety, the bill—recently endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to strengthen the power of unions.

  Always nice to see one party advocating bad ideas that the other party hasn't had yet.

• I needed five guesses at today's Wordle. Roger Pielke provides me an excuse: Climate Change is Making Us Stupid.

  I take the title of today’s post from the closing line of a fantastic 2014 article by Dan Sarewitz in Slate. Sarewitz wrote:

  “Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the world from collapsing—stop burning fossil fuels. And thus, worse because the climate-change-as-apocalypse orthodoxy thereby radically narrows the range of viewpoints we are willing to tolerate and the range of options we are willing to consider for dealing with complex challenges to our well-being like natural disasters and infectious disease and poverty and civil strife.”

  The notion of climate change has collapsed our discussions of complex environmental-social-political issues into a cartoonish characterization of “climate change” as an all-purpose causal agent responsible for just about everything that people don’t like — Wildfires? Climate change. Immigration? Climate change. Jellyfish? Climate change.

  Roger argues, very convincingly, that it's a fundamental mistake to attribute causality to "climate change"; it's a symptom, not a cause.

• As I prepare to go to my local farmstand to buy an ear of corn for tonight's dinner… David Friedman shakes his head at Local Patriotism.

  

  The sign, from an Eat ‘n Park that we sometimes eat at on our Pennsic trip, expresses a common sentiment, that it is virtuous to buy from someone who lives close to you instead of from someone farther away, support the economy of your town instead of that of some other town, that it is “just the right thing to do.”

  Why?

  David proposes possible explanations: "Evolutionary Psychology","Commitment Strategy", and "Defective Moral Vision".

  Me, I just like the increased probability that the farm stand corn is fresher than I can get at Hannaford.